


Lazarus Stone - Lazarus Rising

by ThisBeautifulDrowning



Series: The Lazarus Stone Arc [1]
Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Bloodplay, M/M, Mysticism, Slash, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2014-02-04
Packaged: 2018-01-11 03:44:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 89,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1168272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisBeautifulDrowning/pseuds/ThisBeautifulDrowning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years after the failed resurrection of the Freak, Eszet once again rear their heads and reach for world domination. Crawford calls his team mates back to Tokyo, where he plans to oppose the dawning Eszet terror. But some things were never finished five years ago, and Farfarello... knows how to bear a grudge. As Schuldig feels himself more and more drawn to the Irishman, strange things are happening, and in the end one must ask himself what the greater danger is - that from within, or that from without?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is unbeta'd, unedited, probably full of spelling errors ( not to mention copious amounts of purple prose ) and I'm uploading it solely because people keep asking for it. Read at your own risk.

**Lazarus: Rising**

 

**Prologue**

 

_How did it start back then?_

_With a dream._

_With death._

_With you._

 

 

 

The crow sweeps down from its perch atop the roof and descends over the screaming city like a black shadow, accompanied by the sound of the wind sliding through ebony feathers. Through the glass and steel gullies of the night it finds its way, drawn toward the site where the dead scream tonight, its age-old instinct of being hungry and needing food to quench that hunger unerringly guiding it toward the black shores of the ocean. Spreading its wings to their limit, it soars high above the rolling waves that, tonight, carry the smell of salt, oil and blood toward the city. Its keen eyes find the miniature figures on the nighttime sand, weakly crawling toward the safety of the rocks guarding the stretch of beach the crow is flying toward now. The crow clenches its claws into the unforgiving stone of the rocks and shudders; maybe its instincts know this place is cursed, that this place will forever carry the smell of blood, but the hunger is stronger. After a moment of what could be called hesitation if crows were measured by human standards, the black bird descends onto the wet, grainy sands of the shore and hops between the bodies carried out of the ocean by waves that at this time of the day seem black. The smell of blood is stronger down here, like a heavy perfume, and the crow flaps its wings and lights upon the chest of a man whose head is missing to pick at the raw, red stump of the neck, the first taste of meat making the bird’s body shudder yet again in delight.

 

A gunshot: the crow evolves into a ball of feathers and sinew and blood, its surprised and agonized and angry croak echoing despite the roaring of the waves, breaking against the stone of the rocks. In less than a heartbeat, the graceful black bird is reduced to a smear of feathers and blood strewn across a stretch of sand.

 

The hand that holds the gun wavers before it drops against the wet sand and the man who the hand is attached to presses his brow against the grains, drawing a deep, bubbling breath through his mouth. He ignores the agonizing pain running up the nerves in his arm, pain that comes from the little bloody stubs where his small and ring fingers used to be. He does not heed the sand that invades his mouth and grates against his teeth; he does not care for the grains that stick to his cheeks, his eyelashes, to every part of his body that is pressed against the shore. He slides his fingers across the smooth, wet metal of the gun and praises himself for having made it out alive. Behind him, the spires and domes of a monumental building are sinking into the ocean. The man has no eyes for that. After a minute of simply breathing, he lifts his head and looks around, trying to distinguish dead from alive bodies. He listens, but the roaring of the waves and the sucking, gushing sound of the building sinking to its watery grave do not allow him to hear much more than his own heartbeat thundering in his chest, his heart beating against his ribcage in an angry exclamation: I am alive! 

 

The man rolls over abruptly as a hand touches the back of his neck; the gun in his hand is trained on a tired, blood-streaked face hovering above him a moment later. He recognizes the face and lets the gun drop, his mouth drawing into a tight, grim line as he sits up and is violently ill onto his legs, his stomach expelling the fluid it is not meant to carry. He becomes aware of motion around him, previously assumed dead bodies begin to move, four out of forty-two, he included. The man thanks whatever deity is listening that the bodies that move are the right ones; he would have to shoot the wrong ones, and he does not have enough bullets left. 

 

Like rats crawling away from the ocean after surviving the sinking ship, four men make their way toward the rocks guarding the shore; slowly, aching limbs and strained lungs making their process a tiresome and tedious one. 

 

But they make it.

 

They make it.

 

That is all that matters.

 

Five years later, the same man sits in his stylish New York office and receives news that his daughter and wife have been killed on the highway. 

 

Just as he expected it.

 

He regards the NYPD officers standing in the door to his office calmly, eyes sliding over their hands holding their hats, the regret on their faces. Somewhere inside him, something twists and screams at the news, some primal part not wanting to accept what he knows to be the truth. They tell him they would like him to accompany them. He thanks the officers, his voice brittle yet calm, and closes the door after they have stepped outside to wait for him before he sits back down in the leather office chair behind his desk. 

 

He looks at the photograph standing framed on an edge of the desk and reaches out to touch it, his fingertips sliding over the faces of three smiling people, two of whom are dead now.

 

And he remembers the crow. Remembers how its body turned into a ball of feathers, sinew and blood, remembers the angry croak that echoed off the rocks guarding the black shore five years ago; his sobs have nothing in common with that croak but they carry the same outrage, the same pain, the same sadness. He sits behind his desk and cradles his face in his hands, tasting the tears that run down his cheeks; they taste of salt, and he is thinking of the shore again. For a single moment, he wishes he had died with Amy and their little girl, wishes his body would have gone under in the explosion of rubber, metal and upholstery, wishes he were dead. He sits and cries until he feels empty and dead inside. 

 

Then he wipes the tears off his face and steps outside his office, nodding at the NYPD officers waiting for him, and goes with them to identify by sight what is left of the bodies of his wife and daughter. 

 

He buries them on the evening of the day after that.

 

When he returns home from the burial, he walks into the living room of the comfortable apartment his wife insisted they paint a warm yellow. He calls his business associate and tells him he will need the rest of the week off. Then, he sits in the leather armchair and watches the news, a glass of whiskey cradled against his chest and a gun on his lap, and waits for the man he knows will come to kill him. 

 

He receives a phone call. Listens. Nods to the empty room. Hangs up.

 

He waits.

 

When the assassin comes, the man is ready for him. He shoots him twice in the head, the shots muffled by the gun’s silencer. He leaves the corpse where it is, stretched out in the dark hallway of the apartment, and packs a travel bag in the bedroom, taking care to straighten out the bed sheets after he is done. He stands in the middle of the bedroom, travel bag in one hand, coat folded over his arm, and silently says good-bye to the room, the bed, his life. 

 

Then he walks out of the bedroom and into the hallway. He steps over the corpse and leaves the front door to the apartment open, and walks to the elevator. On the ground floor of the apartment building, he looks at the corpse of the night guard, and then he walks out into the rainy New York night. The faint drizzle soaks into the cloth of his shirt and makes his hair hang wetly into his face, and by the time he has reached his car his teeth have started to chatter from the cold. As he drives away from the private parking lot, he sees the black van pulling away from the curb and filing into the light traffic behind him. 

 

His reflection in the rearview mirror coldly smiles back at him. 

 

“Follow me,” he says, his hands tightening around the steering wheel. His voice sounds as flat and dead to his own ears as he feels inside. “I’ll take good care of you.”

 

**January 15** **th** **, 2002, Venice**

**1147 Hours**

 

He was awake or he was not; for him there was no middle ground. Thanks to a life where not being able to snap out of sleep in a matter of seconds could mean death, he did not think sleep to be a time of rest, but a time of danger. When he slept, he was vulnerable to things seeping in, festering in his mind like cancer, gnawing at the structures of his dreams until they caved and became nightmares. Never the other way around. His dreams did not start out as nightmares, they evolved, or he had none at all. Then, sleep was a blessing. 

 

Sitting wide awake in bed now, the gun trained on the door to his hotel suite in hands that had found the weapon on his nightstand before his mind commanded them to do so, he contemplated that maybe even his dreams weren’t his own anymore; at least they hadn’t been for a very long time. They were other people’s dreams, coming to him on soft feet when his mind was unguarded, for not even the best training could prevent mental shields from slipping when one slept. Other people’s dreams, other people’s nightmares, other people’s wishes, hopes, fears, desires…

 

Schuldig wished for something of his own, something to hold on to. He called few things his own, other than material belongings that meant both everything and nothing to him in a world that had lost its meaning a long time ago. 

 

Five years ago, precisely. 

 

In the grand scheme of things, it probably meant nothing, this feeling of having no direction, of swimming in an ocean of possibilities but not finding any interesting enough to follow up on. Having been on the verge of death had sharply put things into focus for him back then and reminded him of how fickle life really was. Nothing but a span of years stretching ahead to the horizon, marked by events of varying importance and effect. 

 

Once they had been kings in a land far and wide, all doors open to them. Once, they had had an aim, a goal, to work forward to. Seeing that going down the drain had ripped the rug out from under him. For a while, at least. When he had recovered the ground beneath his feet, the freedom that came with what had happened had been as intoxicating as a drug, until it became boring, like so many things become boring so fast. 

 

Perhaps this was why he kept moving so often, from city to city, country to country, never feeling truly at home in any of them. Cheap motel rooms and expensive suites in hotels, none of them being anything more but a room where he put his suitcases down and his body in bed for sleep that came reluctantly, marked his life after the fall of Schwarz. Day after day fading away into gray oblivion like the pages ripped off a calendar and falling to a floor that swallowed them up. 

 

The soft knock on the door to his current hotel room somewhere in the middle of Venice did not elicit anything more but a soft sigh from Schuldig, the aim of his gun remaining steady. Things did not surprise him anymore. 

 

Schuldig felt pleasantly surprised as the person who entered the hotel room after a second knock and switched on the light turned out to be Brad Crawford.

 

\---

 

They found an all-night café on the Riva di Biasio that bordered directly on the Canal Grande, and sat down in a booth by a window, a tired waitress bringing them steaming mugs of coffee and a beignet for Schuldig, her bloodshot eyes sliding over the bedraggled appearance of the latter with no great interest. The telepath mused that when you worked in one of these cafés you were bound to see all sorts of strange folks - every large city had a place for the children of the night. He watched her curvy form disappear through a door behind the counter and caught a glimpse of a TV set on a table before the door closed, the sign on it marking the area behind it as ‘Private’. 

 

There were two other people in the café, a man in a worker’s overall at the counter reading a newspaper, and a second waitress cleaning a glass behind the counter, reading the newspaper upside down. 

 

Schuldig sipped his coffee and imagined particles of caffeine seeping in through his eyeballs with the steam. Across the Velcro-covered table, Crawford was watching him quietly, right hand slung around his own cup. The telepath studied that hand, the lack of the small and ring fingers slightly unsettling. He still remembered the anger and the surprise on Crawford’s face the day a single gunshot had crippled his right hand, the day the lack of a single vision had nearly cost all of them their lives.

 

“Took me a while to find you,” Crawford said after a moment had passed. His voice was the same as Schuldig remembered it, sounding maybe a bit wiser, a bit older. Crawford was 32 now, but five years had left no traces on the American’s handsome face other than deepening the crease between his eyebrows and scattering two or three crow’s feet around the edges of his eyes. Perhaps the shine of those eyes, colored a warm brown, was a bit duller than it had been five years ago, but for all Schuldig knew, it could have been the light. “You’ve moved a lot.”

 

“Yeah.” Another sip of coffee; the telepath tasted his beignet and drew a face, pushing the plate away after one bite. It tasted like what the eyes of the waitress had looked like: tired and old. He lit a cigarette instead and offered one to Crawford, who accepted. Smoking was one of the habits he had picked up after leaving Japan; sleeping with a cocked gun on his nightstand or sometimes even on the pillow next to his head or with the gun butt pressed against his stomach was another. “Guess I never found my place to settle down and have a family complete with a dog and two brats. What about you?”

 

“LA and New York, depending on the weather,” Crawford exhaled an unsteady string of smoke and leaned back, regarding the other through half-closed eyes. He was not wearing glasses anymore, Schuldig noticed, and found his next question answered before he had voiced it. “Had them fixed after hauling ass out of Japan. I was tired of pushing those damn glasses up my nose all the time.”

 

Schuldig smirked and mirrored Crawford’s posture, feeling both ridiculed and on the other hand almost glad the American used his precognition. Ridiculed because he had hated it, back then, when Crawford pre-empted questions or comments, glad because it was something he was used to and familiar with. 

 

“You haven’t changed much,” Crawford said lightly, tilting his head to the side. 

 

“Did you expect me to?”

 

“Not really.”

 

“Why are you here, Crawford? You didn’t reappear after five years just to make small-talk.”

 

The American chuckled lightly, the same chuckle Schuldig had heard him use while pointing a gun at someone and blowing their head away or dealing with a client. No, Crawford had not really changed. 

 

“Two weeks ago my wife and daughter were killed on the highway on their way back from a visit to Amy’s mother. A day after that, someone was sent to kill me. I shot them, left New York, and now I’m here.”

 

“You were _married_?” Schuldig asked loudly and incredulously, drawing the attention of the waitress behind the counter and the man reading the newspaper; damn foreigners, Schuldig heard the man’s thoughts, while the waitress was trying to figure out if that exclamation had been meant for her. Schuldig wiped their thoughts from his conscious awareness, staring at Crawford with an open mouth. Apparently, his assumption that the man had not changed was false; being married was one thing Schuldig had never imagined Crawford could pull off. In his opinion, the American was a born leader, not a father or a husband.

 

“Yes, Schuldig, I was married.” 

 

A slight bit of strain entered Crawford’s voice, and for a moment Schuldig could see something flashing in his eyes, some of the old fire, a hint at the steel that five years ago had been an everyday occurrence in Crawford’s behavior. At the same time as his mind tried to process the unusual information, another part of Schuldig’s mind asked itself how Crawford dealt with the loss of wife and child – during the heyday of Schwarz, the American had hated losing. Back then, it had been mostly matters that concerned Eszet, their erstwhile employer, and the people they worked with on a daily basis. Losing a client, something not turning out the way he had planned it – it had been enough to tumble Brad Crawford into rotten moods that sometimes lasted for _days_. Schuldig could only vaguely guess how Crawford would be feeling now. This time, it had not been a client, or a plan. This time, it had been personal. 

 

“Don’t,” Crawford said softly, his right hand snaking across the table to wrap around Schuldig’s wrist in a harsh grip.

 

The telepath ignored the word and swept past the barriers that protected Brad Crawford’s conscious mind, destroying them with an ease that was as natural to him as breathing. Although he was aware of the hand around his wrist, and of everything around them, the larger part of ‘Schuldig’ dissolved as it met Crawford’s thoughts, became a sponge, soaking up impressions, feelings, thoughts, images as it swept through the layers that made up ‘Brad Crawford’. He hadn’t done it in five years, but every mind was basically the same, and it took little for an experienced and trained telepath like Schuldig to move the useless information aside – the feeling of the clothing against Crawford’s skin, the way the bones of Schuldig’s wrist seemed to shift beneath Crawford’s hand, the residue of the coffee on Crawford’s tongue – and dive deeper into the labyrinth of emotion. 

 

In the two seconds between Crawford grabbing Schuldig’s wrist and the telepath pretending he heeded Crawford’s soft-spoken order, Schuldig had touched a fingertip to the tightly woven ball of anger, hate and grief buried deeply beneath the outwardly cool and nonchalant posture of the American. He knew just how deeply Crawford was hurt. He knew Crawford’s wife Amy had been a moderately tall woman with chestnut brown hair and striking green eyes, and that their daughter Sasha had had Crawford’s black hair and warm brown eyes. 

 

He found, to his surprise, that Crawford had loved them deeply. While Schuldig knew that every human was capable of caring for something and loving it, he had never thought Crawford capable of that. Five years ago, the only thing Crawford had been ‘in love with’ had been his work. He had seen him shoot women and children. 

 

Schuldig twisted his wrist out of Crawford’s grip, and thought that time did really change people. 

 

“All right,” he said. “Your wife and daughter were killed. Someone was sent to kill you. And now you’re here. What now?”

 

Crawford pulled his arm back across the table and flexed his fingers; he gave Schuldig a measuring stare, and for a moment, Schuldig thought he could see a brief flash of hurt in Crawford’s eyes. 

 

“I know you’ve been – inside.” Crawford said slowly. “Don’t do that again.”

 

Schuldig shrugged; he did not in the least feel remorse for blatantly ignoring Crawford’s privacy, even on such a delicate matter. Five years ago, the telepath had entered Crawford’s mind on a daily basis just to vex the man – had Crawford honestly been expecting that to change? He met Crawford’s eyes with his own and held the piercing glare easily. 

 

Crawford sighed and lifted his coffee cup, motioning to the waitress behind the counter for a refill. The woman had been watching the lightning quick exchange between the two with obvious fascination; she lingered at their table after refilling Crawford’s cup until Schuldig gave her a mental shove that directed her interest to the TV he had seen through the open door the other waitress had disappeared through.

 

With the waitress gone, Schuldig asked again, “So, what now?”

 

“I want you to come back to Tokyo with me.”

 

“Why Tokyo?” Schuldig lit another cigarette. “If I remember correctly, five years ago we all more or less swore never to set foot there again. Why go back there?”

 

“Because that is where we’ll get them. Eszet spent the last four years tearing themselves to pieces from inside. After the Elders died -”

 

“– were killed, you mean…”

 

“– they had trouble deciding on who the new leaders would be. There were a few rebellions, a few megalomaniacs trying to gain power, a few others who had something against being under the lead of a new core of Elders again, and in the end, the strongest group won out. They’re trying for the Asian continent again.”

 

“I still don’t see what that’s got to do with us?” The telepath snipped ash into the ashtray and shrugged lightly. “Let them get Japan. China. I don’t care.”

 

“They came after me. Rumor has it they’re hunting down renegade Gifted who went AWOL after the Elders died. They’ll be coming after you, too. They’re trying to tie up loose ends before they pursue the grander plan.”

 

“I’d like to see them try.” Schuldig offered Crawford a lazy smile. “They hit you where it hurts. Me? They can only kill me, and others have tried that before.”

 

Visibly irritated, Crawford exhaled sharply. “I need your help. For what I have in mind – I need your help.”

 

Schuldig’s smile widened. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He could not help it. There had always been and would always be something about Brad Crawford that made Schuldig want to scratch at the image of cool aloofness the American presented to others. “What for?”

 

“I am going to kill them.”

 

A raised eyebrow. 

 

“All of them,” Crawford added. 

 

The other eyebrow rose. “You’re out of your mind, Crawford.”

 

“Do you have anything better to do at the moment?”

 

He did not.

 

\---

 

Imagine an organization rotting from the core, turning upon the ideals it had set for itself years in the past, slowly being corrupted by power-hungry leaders who were as dangerous as they were megalomaniac, and you have Eszet. Schuldig was sure that when the original founders built their castle in the mountain ranges of Austria, the good of man and the world had been their goal. However, things never pan out the way we want them to, and Eszet was a prime example of that rule. 

 

Schuldig was 10 when he was brought to Rosenkreuz, Eszet’s school for the Gifted. None of the children who lived and died under the rule of the Rosenkreuz teachers and trainers had actually ever been to the castle, as it was generally called back then. Rosenkreuz had been there first, and Eszet had evolved from it, gradually swallowing the school and twisting its good intentions until it resembled an insane artist’s disfigured sculpture rather than the place of knowledge and enlightenment it had been meant to be. 

 

As a child, it is easy to be intimidated. As a child, it is easy to be won over with promises. Rosenkreuz ruled through fear and promises, gathering children from all over the world to shape them into minions fit to carry out the plans of Eszet, forming them into adults who could kill with a thought or set fire to people and buildings with a touch. 

 

As a pupil of Rosenkreuz, either you conformed to them or you broke. Schuldig had ended up there after one of their agents had performed tests on his school class in Germany; he found out years later that this was how they actually found most of the luckless bastards who ended up in Rosenkreuz: telepaths disguised as teachers, sent to schools, orphanages, juvenile prisons, mind-raping children to test for latent Gifts. It had been a simple matter of leaving school and being pulled into a car, sedated, waking up hours later among a huddling mass of children of all ages and nationalities with strangers droning on about how lucky they were in seven languages. 

 

They were the Chosen Ones. 

 

They were the tools to carry out Eszet’s dreams of world domination. 

 

They were also Eszet’s property, but they failed to mention that until much later. 

 

His years in Rosenkreuz were not very bad. He was taught to control something he had not even known he possessed, something that set him apart from the rest of his family, his friends, and the people around him. Some said in order to become what Eszet ultimately wanted them to be, they had to have some kind of pre-laid foundation within their very character – as they say that a murderer needs to have an ingrained lust for blood to kill. Killing can be taught, characters can be shaped. Look at religion; it works much the same way.

 

People with weak characters are easily broken or shaped into something entirely new. Schuldig had been raised to be independent and know his own worth; it was what probably saved him from becoming one of Eszet’s drones in the end. The nastier strains of his character…he acquired those on his own. He would be the first to admit that he enjoyed what he was doing – there was no thing sweeter to him than the rush that comes with raping someone’s mind, manipulating them to fit his own wishes and demands. Rosenkreuz tried to break him; he paid them back by retaining his own sense of self and killing two teachers who tried to rape him to show him his place. Rosenkreuz tried to teach him obedience, he learned how to obey and work against them at the same time. 

 

He was 17 when he left Rosenkreuz, and never returned there. He was put on an airplane together with Brad Crawford and sent to America. His first job turned out to be a congressional representative for whom they worked as bodyguards, gradually influencing him and his peers to reinstate the death penalty in a state that still upheld this kind of punishment in the 21st century. 

 

He saw ordinary, everyday people as nothing more than nuisances or playthings. His regard of the human race had never been exceptionally high after going through Rosenkreuz. To him, they were aimlessly running ants, good for a kill or a fuck, nothing more. He both hated humans and loved them because they supplied him with entertainment, but if he had to choose between loving them and hating them, he would choose hate. He never doubted that Rosenkreuz training had implanted that sentiment over the years, but who was he to change it if not changing it kept him apart from those nuisances? He only needed to look around him to stay firm in his belief. Humanity had always had its ways of making outcasts of people who veered from what was considered ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’ behavior. No doubt, to them, he was nothing more but an oddity of nature who acted upon primal needs, unfit to fit into society.

 

No one had ever asked him, or any other of those ‘oddities’ out there, if they wanted to be part of that society in the first place. If some government would set their laws back to the arcane rule of ‘an eye for an eye’, Schuldig would be the first to vote for them. Suppressing needs and instincts was nothing more but trying to force someone into a shape they were not meant to be. By the time he concluded that humanity could kiss his ass after he had played with them, he had said good-bye to the memories of his childhood. 

 

Moreover, he enjoyed what he was doing. 

 

Things became tricky when they were assigned a job in Japan, half a year after Schuldig’s 18th birthday. Crawford and he began to work for Takatori Reiji, back then only a successful businessman who hungered for more than just money; he was the perfect target for Eszet. Eszet believed that in order to attain power, controlling political figures was the best way, and Schuldig seconded that belief. Ambitious people were easy to seduce – dangle something they want in front of their noses, and they will bend over backwards for it. Takatori Reiji, about whose dysfunctional family Schuldig had once sworn never to think again, proved to be a spectacularly easy man to persuade to the ways of Eszet. He was also stupid enough to believe that he, a mere human, would be granted a share in the power when the end came. 

 

He died quickly, and messily, and thankfully, prematurely. 

 

However, that came later. Before Takatori Reiji ended up skewered and a little crispy in the late summer of 1997, Crawford and Schuldig acquired two new members for their team. They picked Nagi Naoe off the streets of Kyoto, where they found him after following reports on a child who ‘moved things with his mind’. Underfed, violated and generally ill-treated, Nagi met them with suspicion and fear, only gradually mellowing out toward Crawford and Schuldig. He was a powerful telekinetic, untrained. Crawford took it upon him to train Nagi, refusing to send the child to Rosenkreuz where he would have been shattered and put back together. They did get to know about him, but Crawford, through whatever lies, managed to persuade Eszet headquarters that Nagi was only a weak telekinetic, not worth the trouble of being fed and taught at Rosenkreuz. Eszet agreed, and they as Schwarz were three. 

 

Their fourth member was a nightmare on two legs. Getting a hold of him and then _keeping_ him was a lot harder than getting a hold of Nagi had been. Most Gifted were found due to Eszet agents going to schools and other places where children were ‘kept’; Schwarz had long since learned how to intercept messages sent to Eszet headquarters concerning these newfound children while they were looking for members for Schwarz. The news about a boy in an Irish asylum for the insane did not really catch their attention at first, until the second news revealed that Jay O'Siodhachain was strangely immune to pain. 

 

They forgot to mention that he also had a serious God complex and an insatiable hunger for blood. Schwarz did not find out about that until they had him in their car on the way to London's Heathrow Airport. It took both Crawford and Schuldig to hold him down while Nagi injected him with a drug that would have brought an elephant to its knees, and still he moved and struggled. Once they were back in Japan, Crawford had one of the rooms in the apartment they lived in turned into a cell. As with Nagi, they never sent Jay to Rosenkreuz. Crawford had the amazing ability to turn the moon green for others when they just listened to him long enough. 

 

So there they were, the fucked up little family of four. Crawford became their eyes, his ability to glimpse the future making him their safety net in all operations, his sleek way of talking their spokesperson. Nagi became the wizard in all things electronic, the manipulator and forger of false documents, and the one they sent to wreak destruction upon buildings. Jay, who began to call himself Farfarello shortly after they brought him to Japan, became the murder weapon, the Berserker, that one nearly unstoppable sadomasochistic individual who made everyone uneasy and whose motives no one understood, Schwarz included at times. 

 

Schuldig? He was the one who raped minds.

 

By the time he turned 22, they had established themselves as Takatori Reiji’s reliable bodyguards and henchmen. Little did the man know that he was nothing more but a tool for them and Eszet subsequently; an ambitious man captured completely on the prospect of power they dangled in front of him. 

 

It took the meeting of black and white to set Schwarz on the supposedly final path that would rid them of Eszet. Weiß were an assassin group put together by some shady organization called Kritiker, incidentally consisting of four young men whom fate had fucked over enough to make them believe in the good of what they did. They proved to be a formidable enemy at times, and provided Schuldig with a lot of entertainment. It was through a lucky coincidence that Weiß were to become of interest to Eszet – and Schwarz. 

 

Eszet’s goal had turned from the good of man to world domination. Schuldig had never been completely sure how they thought they would bring this world domination on, other than slowly trying to infiltrate every government of the world with Gifted who worked toward Eszet’s goals; this process would have been slow and tedious, requiring years, if not decades. As it was, they were not patient enough to wait for that. They turned to the use of occult rites instead. 

 

Sixty years ago, through some lucky coincidence, a freak had been born in Japan. His true name had since then been lost, substituted with the names the children of Rosenkreuz and the leaders of Eszet had conjured up for him over the years. He had been a freak because he possessed more than one or two Gifts. Most Gifted have one, some have two, and in rare cases, they have three. This man had seven. He died, as most great people, before his time was up, but his memory lived on in the minds of those who had known him, festering there until the idea of resurrecting him and using him to Eszet’s advantages was born. 

 

And while Eszet would provide the tool to resurrect him, Schwarz were the lucky bastards who were supposed to find a host for this freak.

 

And it was easier to find one than they had thought.

 

The host was there right under their noses.

 

Eszet’s idea was as following: resurrect dead guy. Put dead guy with powerful government. Rule world.

 

Schwarz’s idea was as following: switch host of the dead freak with random person so resurrection does not work. Kill Eszet leaders. Use host to their own advantage, resurrect dead freak, wipe out the rest of Eszet and Rosenkreuz and possibly as many Gifted as they could, get rid of dead freak again, and be happy ever after.

 

That the host for the dead freak turned out to be the comatose sister of one of the Weiß assassins made things all the sweeter.

 

But they fucked up. Badly. Weiß proved to be harder to get rid off in the end than they had thought, and left Schwarz behind with the ruins of their dream, three dead Eszet Elders, and a future that for the first time in their lives was their own to shape. And like a child having too much free time and nothing to do, they played around a bit, and then broke apart. Schuldig put five years between himself and Japan.

 

And now he was going back.

 

**January 17** **th** **, 2002, Tokyo**

**0945 Hours**

 

There was something magic about metropolises such as Tokyo. Schuldig stood still in the middle of the sidewalk and simply let the people flow around him, each brush of an elbow or a shoulder accompanied by a sudden electric lightning of thought, dream and desire. His Gift was strongest when he was touching others; thoughts were elusive and fluttered under his astral fingers like nervous butterflies; a touch brought solidity to reality as fragile as the peace he sought when he slept. A good head taller than the average Japanese citizen, Schuldig saw himself surrounded by a sea of dark heads as he finally let himself be swept from his spot by the masses streaming down the boulevards of Ginza. He left it to Crawford to follow him. 

 

As a telepath, Schuldig had access to the deepest and most private thoughts of every being on the planet. To him, it did not matter if he could not understand the oral language a person thought, dreamed and spoke in; thoughts were individually flavored, and after a while, one learned to distinguish between the slow melting taste of desire and the fiery hot or deadly cold sting of rage. Those flavors stood out among the multitude of duller tastes like the tops of a snowy mountain range. People thought in simple words and rarely in coherent sentences, and a thought could end as abruptly and shift into something else like a bee zigzagging back and forth between flowers. More often than not, his skill required him to understand the subtle nuances between shifts in emotion rather than the shifts in a thought process; interpreting those nuances required intimate knowledge of the human psyche. Having spent all of his 27 years with the world’s voices inside his head had given him ample opportunity to learn all those nuances, being adequately fluent in Japanese made it even more easy to understand the multitude of thoughts now pressing against the fragile shell that protected his inner self from the outside world, and after twenty minutes of letting himself be carried with the stream, Schuldig sighed and knew that the magic he thought visible in Tokyo and other large metropolises mostly stemmed from the architecture rather than the people who inhabited the glass towers and maze-like streets. 

 

He was jaded, Schuldig knew. Jaded, and most likely simply disappointed that coming back to Japan and Tokyo specifically had not significantly changed much. He stepped up to the marble façade of a house and dug into his pockets for a cigarette, irritated at himself for feeling disappointed. _What_ was he disappointed in? 

 

Crawford, dressed in more formal attire than Schuldig’s Jeans and shirt, adjusted the lapels of his dark gray suit and stepped up next to Schuldig, his gaze going out over the sidewalk.

 

“I see this city is still a shit hole,” Schuldig said off-handedly. He inhaled smoke and regarded Crawford through the rising blue-gray fumes. 

 

The American pursed his mouth. “Tokyo is Tokyo.” He shrugged lightly. “Just as New York will always be New York and Venice will always be Venice. Why should anything change?”

 

_Because I want it to,_ Schuldig thought, and then snorted at himself. He sounded like a bratty teenager who did not get what he wanted. Thinking about it, he could not even pinpoint what exactly he had expected to be different. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. 

 

“Where are you dragging me again, Crawford?”

 

“We’re going to pick up Farfarello. Or at least try to.” Crawford touched Schuldig’s elbow and stepped back into the flow of humanity, waiting until Schuldig followed him. “I spoke to him on the phone, but he wasn’t very inclined to listen to me.”

 

“Since when do they let a certified sociopath take any phone calls?” Idly, Schuldig combed through the surface thoughts of an elderly man walking in front of them, persuading him to move out of their way. “And since when is there a mental ward in the middle of Ginza?”

 

“Farfarello isn’t in a mental ward.” 

 

They turned off the sidewalk and walked down a narrow alley that lead them away from the shopping boulevard of the heart of the city. Here, the pavement was uneven, and the roofs of the houses seemed to tilt toward one another, sharply setting the area apart from the clean cut, glass-and-chrome dominated face of the streets meant for tourists. Crawford led Schuldig into an even narrower side street branching off from the alley. They stopped in front of a metal door with a simple iron lamp hanging over it, turned off at this time of day. While the telepath was still looking up and down the street, trying to remember if he had ever been here before, Crawford pressed the bell, and then briefly spoke to someone as the door opened a crack. The telepath paid no attention to the conversation and followed Crawford as the door opened fully and allowed them into a narrow corridor that ended in a large, shady room. 

 

Schuldig stepped around Crawford and looked around, raising his eyebrows at the sight of a dance floor and a long, polished bar that took up most of the wall to their right. In front of them, the burly Japanese man Crawford had spoken to vanished up a flight of wooden stairs that lead into what Schuldig guessed was the upper floor; as he looked up though, he revised that thought. The stairs lead up into a loft hanging suspended over half of the room he and Crawford stood in; massive metal beams supported the construction that looked like a balcony built into a house rather than on the outside of it. A balcony with stonewalls. On the front wall, two large windows with tinted glass looked out over the dance floor. 

 

“Nice,” Schuldig commented, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “What did he do, win the lottery?”

 

“No. He works as a paid killer for whoever can afford to pay him. You can imagine his success rate.” 

 

Schuldig’s comment about payment in blood was cut short as the door the Japanese man had closed behind him at the end of the stairs slammed open hard enough to bounce back from the wall. He turned his head and then moved out of the way, a reaction that was more instinct than rational thought: five years ago, putting himself between Farfarello and Farfarello’s target had meant mutilation or death. 

 

Apparently, Farfarello’s target was Crawford. Schuldig blinked as the man he had spent years with stormed down the stairs and crossed the dance floor in large strides; on the flight to Tokyo, Crawford had dropped several comments about Farfarello having changed, and Schuldig found himself taking in those changes with a little more than surprise. As if detached from the actual happenings – Farfarello wrapping his fingers into the front of Crawford’s suit and slamming the American back against the wall next to the corridor, the shouting, Crawford’s upraised hands pressing against Farfarello’s chest – Schuldig took in the visual changes first. 

 

A little over six feet tall and thus nearly half a head taller than Schuldig, Farfarello was nothing but muscles stretched taught over bone. Schuldig could see the tendons in his neck and in his arms press against the pale skin as the Irishman repeatedly shoved Crawford against the wall. The man had been the closest to a human bulldog Schuldig had ever seen while he had been in Schwarz; now, everything about Farfarello seemed lighter, more slender. It took the telepath a moment to realize that the white coil hanging down Farfarello’s back to nearly his thighs was not the latest rage in fashion, but hair. It seemed Farfarello had let it grow. Considerably. It had been cropped short when he was in Schwarz. 

 

Schuldig’s attention shifted from the shouting Irishman to the Japanese who had followed Farfarello down the stairs; he put this one close to his own age, maybe a little younger. The man noticed Schuldig’s attention and shifted flat, black eyes to the telepath, his even face expressionless. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest and one hip cocked; dressed in black Jeans and a gray shirt, the young man looked every bit like the annoyed housewife who lets her husband have fun while not fully approving of it. The arrogance in the black eyes made Schuldig smile.

 

“So, got a boy toy, Far?”

 

The shouting match between the Irishman and Crawford ended abruptly. Schuldig tilted his head to the side and watched Farfarello as he turned his head around, his single eye so light with rage it almost glowed in the semi-darkness of the bar. Crawford used the momentary distraction to yank Farfarello’s hands off his suit and step away from him, taking calming breaths. 

 

Farfarello regarded Schuldig for a long moment before he turned around and bellowed something at the young man behind him. Effortlessly, Schuldig picked up a name. Nagumo. The young man sent Schuldig and Crawford a scorching glance before he turned around and walked back into the loft. The door slammed shut. Farfarello turned back to face Crawford, obviously ignoring Schuldig’s question; the telepath needed no answer; he had picked it from Nagumo’s mind. Not lovers, but close, with Nagumo wishing for more. 

 

“You asked me once, and the same answer still holds true,” the Irishman said to Crawford, his brows lowered. “I want no place in your plans.”

 

“You know what might happen to you if you stay here on your own,” Crawford retorted. 

 

“Others have tried it and failed. I’ll be ready for them.”

 

Schuldig smiled. Almost the same words he had said to Crawford in Venice. He stepped closer to the two men, his hands in his pockets, and gave Farfarello a small smile as the Irishman glared at him. Five years ago, he had tried to read Farfarello’s mind on an almost daily basis, and he had failed each time. Out of curiosity, he tried now, and came up against the same impenetrable shields that had kept him out back then; they were like glassy membranes that surrounded Farfarello’s thoughts, giving under Schuldig’s Gift but allowing no penetration, and after he had pressed mental fingers against them, he retreated again. 

 

Once, he had tried to break through them with force, and the backlash had put him into a daze that lasted for two days. The telepath inwardly shook his head at himself as he felt the same itch he had been feeling back then – the want to try again and see if maybe he could break through on the next try, or the one after that, and so on. 

 

_What we can’t get is always what we want most, eh?_ Schuldig thought. Not so much interested in _what_ Farfarello was thinking, he simply wanted the access and being denied had the same effect on him everything denied to him had: he wanted it even more. For now, though, he contended himself with the knowledge that Farfarello’s shields still were the same. 

 

“You’re trying again, aren’t you?” Farfarello’s face held an expression of exasperation. “You’re still the same asshole you were five years ago.”

 

“And you still have the same big mouth you had five years ago, though now you seem to use it more often,” Schuldig said. 

 

“At least I can close my mouth,” came the answer, paired with an aggravating smile. “Whereas you’ll always be an asshole.”

 

“Can we please get back to the problem at hand?” Crawford interrupted their exchange of pleasantries, his voice sharp. “Farfarello, regardless of what you think of me or thought of me back then, now is not the time for old grudges. We -”

 

“Now is the _best_ time for old grudges!” the Irishman bellowed. “You show up here after five years and expect me to just play along? After leaving me in that cell pumped full with drugs and a wad of money? Have you any idea what I went through?”

 

Schuldig raised both eyebrows and looked at Crawford. Back then, the telepath had been the first to leave, and he did not know how long the others had stayed together before all of them finally went their own ways. Brad Crawford had been responsible for them during the time of Schwarz; with Eszet gone, this had not been the case anymore, so it did not really surprise Schuldig how Crawford had gotten rid of Farfarello – truth be told, he would not have been surprised either if Crawford had shot the Irishman. Farfarello was, or at least had been, clinically insane. In Schuldig’s opinion, out of the optional choices Crawford had had, the man had been kind. 

 

On the other hand, Schuldig was now curious. He had not thought Farfarello capable of taking care of himself back then. The Irishman’s age-old grudge against the Christian god had made him extremely dangerous and prone to sudden rages. This did not seem to be the case anymore. So far, Farfarello was acting remarkably calm. 

 

Crawford stared at Farfarello for a long moment before he shrugged and turned around to stalk back toward the entrance door. “I’ll come back later when you’ve calmed down.”

 

“No,” Farfarello said coldly, lips drawn back from his teeth. “You come back later and I’ll kill you if you ever set foot in here again.”

 

The Irishman turned around as well and walked back up the stairs, the door slamming shut. Schuldig, watching him go, snorted at the threat and then followed Crawford outside. As the entrance door clicked shut behind them, Crawford sighed.

 

“That didn’t go as planned.”

 

Schuldig lit a cigarette. “Our dear psychopath seems to have grown out of his ‘I hate God’ phase. Not a single phrase. I’m impressed.”

 

Crawford gave Schuldig a cool look. “It’ll be hard without him. Farfarello is capable of things none of us is capable of.”

 

Schuldig did not have to access Crawford’s mind to know that the same memories that currently flashed behind his own inner eyes were going through Crawford’s head as well. As they walked back down the street, Schuldig turned his head and looked at the door. Having Farfarello around was the equivalent to having a human wall in front of oneself. If Crawford’s report about what Eszet was planning was any indication, Schuldig would be happy to have that wall.

 

\---

 

Nagi Naoe, Schuldig found out as soon as he stepped through the door into what would be their stronghold for the days and weeks to come, had changed considerably over the last five years. He almost did not recognize him. To Schuldig, who had picked Nagi up off the streets together with Crawford years ago, Nagi had always resembled a stick figure with a too large head and too large eyes; the young man who grasped his hand in a firm grip and shook it was anything but a stick figure. Although, due to his Asian heritage, Nagi would never be as tall or as broad shouldered as a European, he had grown, the top of his head coming up to Schuldig’s eyes. His formerly round face had lost most of its baby fat, had become tight, and angled, all high cheekbones and large almond-shaped eyes set under elegantly drawn eyebrows. Dressed in a stylish navy blue shirt and black pants, his hair a wild feathery mass around his head that reminded Schuldig of the character “Edward” from the movie Edward Scissorhands, Nagi looked like any of those young, successful men that dallied on the streets these days.

 

“Hi Schu,” Nagi said, his voice reserved but warm. “Long time no see.”

 

Schuldig smirked and took a step back to look Nagi up and down. “Wow. Someone’s grown up.”

 

Nagi took the slight barb with a smirk of his own and nodded at Crawford, who shrugged out of his jacket behind Schuldig. Then he stepped to the side and glanced behind Crawford, throwing the American a questioning look.

 

“Farfarello’s not coming, I guess.” Schuldig said before Crawford could. “I’ll go visit him later and talk to him again. Let’s see if I can get him to join.”

 

Crawford gave Schuldig a slightly surprised look but acquiesced. He led his small party into the living room of the spacious apartment and waited until they had seated themselves before he strode to a locked folder closet and gathered a few things up. While Crawford was busy, Schuldig asked Nagi how he had spent the last five years. He learned that Nagi had taken a road that had been predestined for him ever since he had shown himself to be quite capable with computers; he had started out as a freelance programmer after Schwarz had disbanded, and worked his way up in a moderately large company located in Spain. After he had scrounged together enough money, Nagi had started his own one-man company, and his voice held no small amount of pride as he told Schuldig about the contracts he had managed to land. 

 

Schuldig listened with a smirk sitting in the corner of his mouth. Although Nagi had always violently denied it, Crawford had rubbed off on him more than he was probably aware. Like the American, Nagi strove for success, regardless if this had meant being successful on a mission or now in the business world; this was a mark Crawford had left on the Japanese youth. Nagi had been nine years old when they picked him up off the streets, and Schuldig had happily left what little upbringing Nagi had needed to Crawford. 

 

The American sat down in an armchair on the other side of the table that stood between an array of two couches and two armchairs. He placed several folders onto the table and opened one, pulling out a manila folder. 

 

“Okay gentlemen, here are the basics.”

 

Schuldig shook his head and laughed, and then shook his head again as Crawford threw him a questioning look. Okay gentlemen. Five years ago, hearing those two words had meant getting ready for another task, another mission, another boring assignment supposed to further them on their road to being free of Eszet. Back then, hearing those words had mostly aggravated him. Hearing them now amused him.

 

**January 17** **th** **, 2002, Tokyo**

**2130 Hours**

 

He found his way back to the bar without hassle, letting the stream of people on the sidewalks once again carry him. Like most large cities, Tokyo had two faces, and Schuldig preferred the face she showed when the neon signs cast shadows into the night sky. He had fallen in love with the night a long time ago. Things always seemed slicker, deeper and more interesting during the dark hours; although he held mostly contempt for the Goth crowds that existed in every place he had ever been, he could associate with their reverence for the night.

 

Farfarello’s bar, he learned, was called ‘The Seventh Serpent’. He had not seen the neon sign above the door during his previous visit, but as he stood in front of the door now, the ghastly red shades cast upon the brick wall seemed inviting to him. The faces of the two gorillas standing in front of the door were not. Schuldig did not even bother to try and talk to them, but invaded their minds and convinced them that he was a regular customer who had been coming here for years; they let him pass through the metal door without a second glance and did not even frisk him for a weapon, and the venomous whispers coming from the throng of people waiting to be let into the bar just made him smile. 

 

As empty as the bar had been during the day, now it was packed. Thick swaths of smoke hung beneath the ceiling, pierced by the stroboscope flashes of small lights let into the ceiling and parts of the walls. Schuldig slowly made his way through the crowd and ended up squashed against the bar, where a little mental meddling secured him a stool and a free drink. Sitting with his back to the bar, he surveyed the people – most of them seemed to be around his age, some of them younger. The people on the dance floor, moving to the frantic beat of the loud music, were a colorful melee of naked skin, lace, latex and leather. Schuldig could not keep himself from grinning – it was so cliché. Exactly the crowd Farfarello fit right in with, with his exotic features, piercings and preference for black clothing. He wondered how many of these dancing youngsters in here actually knew that the bar belonged to a homicidal psychopath who would mow them from God’s earth without blinking. 

 

He shifted his attention to the people sitting around the tables set up around the dance floor and along the walls. Those were a different crowd. They were older, wiser, and more vicious. He did not need to read their thoughts to know what they were; they were the wolves, the criminals, the shady figures that were as much a part of Tokyo’s nighttime as the glittery crowd was. Scarred faces and hands wrapped around moist glasses, eyes narrowed against the flashing lights, these men and women came closer to what Schuldig and Farfarello were. The telepath spent a long time gazing at them, trying to remember if he had seen some faces before while he leisurely sipped his drink. 

 

He was just about to finish his drink and order another, as the young man he had seen in Farfarello’s company made his way through the crowds toward him. Nagumo had exchanged his clothing for black slacks and a black wifebeater, his narrowed eyes surrounded by smudges of kohl. Schuldig set his empty glass down on the bar and placed a convenient smile on his lips that did not waver even as Nagumo intentionally invaded his private space. 

 

“He told me to get you.” 

  
Schuldig smirked and shifted his eyes to the blackened windows of the loft that hung suspended over the dance floor. He slid off the stool and chuckled as Nagumo took a step back, obviously loath to touch him.

 

“Lead the way, Nagumo.”

 

The startled glance he received was honey on his soul.

 

\---

 

The stairs that led up into the loft ended at a door that opened into a single room with windows going out into the bar. In the middle of the room stood a long table with seven chairs on either side and one chair at the head near the windows. Schuldig looked around curiously, noting Farfarello stood by the windows with his back turned to him. To Schuldig’s right, two doors led off into what he guessed was the rest of the loft. One of them was half-open, and he could glimpse the edge of a couch and a coffee table in the gloom. 

 

Nagumo accompanied Schuldig into the loft and then left them, closing the door a little more forcefully than necessary. 

 

“He thinks you’re a bad omen,” Farfarello said without turning around. 

 

“Story of my life.”

 

Up here, the thundering beat of the music was reduced to a duller sound not unlike a heartbeat. Schuldig walked to the head of the table and pushed the chair to the side as he sat down on the table’s edge, dragging an ashtray closer to his side. 

 

“Did Crawford send you?”

 

Schuldig lit up and exhaled a cloud of smoke before he answered. “No. I came of my own free will. Pretty neat business you have going here.”

 

“Flattered.” Farfarello turned around. 

 

He was wearing tight leather pants and boots, and nothing else. Not for the first time, Schuldig noticed that the man was scarily beautiful. He raised an eyebrow at the pierced nipples before he took in the rest of him; Farfarello’s hair was loose, hanging in long strands over his shoulders and down his back, framing his face and giving it a softer look than when it had been cropped short. Like Nagumo, he had smudges of kohl around his functioning eye. 

 

“What do you want here?”

 

“Talk to you?”

 

“Oh really?”

 

“Would you stop being so darn flippant? It’s not like you.”

 

“People change.” Farfarello crossed his arms over his chest and leaned his back against the window. “Five years, Schu. Five years and I thought I’d never see any of you again. Then suddenly Crawford pops back up like a bad dream, and we’re right back where we started.” He looked to the side, frowning. “The same shit all over again.”

 

The telepath snorted. “Don’t tell me you regret anything you did back then.”

 

“No. But I don’t live in the past.”

 

“That coming from you is actually very amusing, you know that?”

 

Farfarello scowled and Schuldig knew he had hit a nerve. Unable to read Farfarello’s thoughts, Schuldig had had to learn to use mundane methods of dealing with the Irishman when they were in Schwarz; he had learned to interpret facial expressions and tone of voice, which, considering Farfarello had been mostly monosyllabic back then, had been hard enough. 

 

He found it hard to estimate the man now, though. There was still the same arrogance, still the same invisible wall that surrounded Farfarello, but there was something else now, too, and Schuldig could not grasp it. Perhaps it was even something missing. 

 

“Aren’t you going to offer me something to drink?”

 

“You already had a drink.” Farfarello sighed. “What do you want?”

 

“Whiskey.”

 

“That’s not what I mean. What do you want _here_?”

 

“You give me something to drink and I tell you why I’m here, how’s that sound?”

 

“You tell me why you’re here and I’m not cutting a second smile into you, how’s that sound?”

 

Schuldig threw his hands up and slipped off the table. His cigarette died under his heel as he stalked toward the Irishman, his face set in a frown. Although he knew that he was treading potentially dangerous ground now, Farfarello’s antics were beginning to annoy him, and he planned to find out what was wrong with the Irishman.

 

“All right, listen up.” Schuldig ignored the hand that planted itself on the middle of his chest as soon as he stepped into Farfarello’s private space. “I don’t know what crawled up your ass, but I’m tiring of it. If you’re pissy about Crawford leaving you behind drugged to the gills, well, that’s not _my_ problem because _I_ didn’t do it. There’s no reason to be so fucking hostile. We spent years living under the same roof and risking our lives together, and I saved your ass back then more than once because you were too stupid to know when to stop.”

 

“And now you’re expecting me to welcome you with open arms?” Farfarello sneered, his fingers on Schuldig’s chest beginning to claw into the material of the shirt. 

 

Schuldig reached up and wrapped his hand around Farfarello’s wrist. “No. But I think I deserve a little more than just arrogance and an offer to have my throat cut.”

 

“I’m not going to let myself be used again!” Farfarello snapped. He wrenched his hand away from Schuldig and stepped around him to walk toward the table. 

 

“What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy what we were doing! Hell, it was all you were thinking about!”

 

“Oh? And you would know that how?”

 

Schuldig turned from the window and followed the Irishman to the table, irritated. “What’s your fucking problem?”

 

Farfarello stopped at the head of the table where Schuldig had been sitting, his shoulders tense. The telepath stopped a few feet behind him, finding himself briefly distracted by the hair down Farfarello’s back, and the want to touch it. 

 

“My problem,” came the slow answer, “is that five years ago, I was in Schwarz because I was useful to you. You sent me out, patched my wounds back up, and then locked me away just to let me out again when you needed me. You treated me like a dog. All of you.”

 

“Awww. So we didn’t cater to the needs of your delicate soul, and that -”

 

Schuldig found himself flat on his back on the floor with Farfarello straddling his stomach and the sharp edge of a blade pressing against his throat a moment later. The Irishman’s other hand was wound tightly around some hair at the top of Schuldig’s head, threatening to tear it from the scalp as he pressed Schuldig’s head down against the ground and the blade deeper into the skin above Schuldig’s Adam’s apple. The telepath felt his heart skyrocket and hammer in his chest as adrenaline flooded his system, speeding his breath up; above him, Farfarello’s face was tight and whiter than usual with anger. His fingers dug into the flesh of Farfarello’s thighs as he set his feet against the ground; but he did not push, merely froze, staring up at the other man’s face quietly, trying to think of something, anything, that would get the Irishman off him.

 

As it was, he did not have to do anything. Farfarello pressed the knife in deep enough for a fine red line to open across Schuldig’s throat, then his hand shook, and a heartbeat later, Schuldig found himself rolling onto his side and pushing to his knees as Farfarello stalked toward the open door at the other end of the loft. Schuldig scrambled to his feet, one hand gripping his throat.

 

“You fucking bastard!”

 

“Close the door behind you,” Farfarello said tonelessly. He stepped through the open door and slammed it shut behind him.

 

\---

 

When Schuldig returned to the apartment, hours later and still in a very bad mood, Crawford was waiting for him in the living room. On the TV, the newscaster flipped through today’s happenings - a death here, a kidnapping there. Schuldig plunked himself into an armchair and let his head sink against the cushions. 

 

The telepath did not have to look at Crawford to know that the American was staring at the now crusted wound on his throat. It had stopped bleeding while he was still inside the Seventh Serpent, but the dull ache of skin stretched too tight over a fresh wound remained.

 

“He didn’t want to talk to you, either, hm?”

 

“Oh, we did talk. But I apparently didn’t say what he wanted to hear.” 

 

Schuldig kept his eyes closed and listened to Crawford shuffle around; he opened them as a hand lightly touched his shoulder, and accepted the mug of coffee held out for him. When Crawford sat back down, Schuldig took a swallow of the bitter brew and felt the particles of caffeine seep into his bloodstream, tickling the ends of his nerves. 

 

“Nagi and I spent the rest of the evening reopening some of our old lines. We haven’t gone very deep yet, but there is some interesting news. Remember the Lazarus Stone?”

 

Schuldig sent Crawford a look over the rim of the coffee cup and felt the muscles of his hand clench involuntarily. He set the cup down on the edge of the coffee table between them.

 

“Yeah. What about it?”

 

“Well, it was assumed lost after the temple crashed. Apparently, though, Eszet’s new leaders think it’s still around, and they’re right, it is. It was excavated about two years ago and given to a private source to keep it under lock and key.”

 

“The Lazarus Stone is bad news,” Schuldig said darkly. “Whoever has it, I’m amazed Eszet haven’t gotten to them yet.”

 

“They will, as soon as they know where to find it.”

 

“Do _we_ know where it is?”

 

“Not yet. Mostly, we heard just rumors. City authorities ordered an excavation after it became known that this ‘opera house’ near Tokyo Bay was anything but. I had Nagi access the archives of the local newspapers.” Crawford slid a printout across the coffee table. “The remains of the building itself were destroyed after they had been examined. A few things were given to the local museums, paintings, sculptures, and the like.”

 

Schuldig looked at the printout. It was newspaper clippings and two photographs, one of them showing a place near Tokyo Bay he remembered too well. The ‘Lazarus Temple’, as the back-then leaders of Eszet had called the monstrous building, had marked the turning point in his and the rest of Schwarz’s lives back then; it had crashed into the ocean after the summoning of the Freak had called forth powers too great and too destructive for the rocks it was built upon to hold. He still thought it a miracle he and the others had made it out alive and he knew he would dream of the groaning sounds of stone and the creaking of metal that announced the collapse of the structure until he died.

 

The second photo showed the broken fragments of the Lazarus Temple’s great hall. Schuldig remembered the stone titans that had supported the roof; on the photo, a crane was heaving the arm of such a titan out of the water. 

 

“There was talk of a ‘tablet marked with ancient scribbling upon it’.” Crawford went on. “Although the stone itself doesn’t appear by name in any report, I’m sure it’s what they’re talking about. They didn’t know what to do with it, but since it appeared to be very old, they didn’t destroy it, either.”

 

Schuldig placed the printout back on the table. “So where did it go?”

 

“The excavation crew was lead by a woman called Hanae Kitada. Sound familiar?”

 

“Manx.”

 

“Yes. She’s head of the Tokyo Police Department now.”

 

Hanae Kitada, known better as Manx to Schuldig, had been an agent of Kritiker, the organization that, in the end, proved to be Schwarz’s hardest and deadliest enemy. Schuldig remembered her as a moderately tall, red-haired woman in a tight dress and high heels. Although he had only seen her a couple of times, and met her face-to-face just once, she had fought against Schwarz as bitterly as the group of assassins she was responsible for. He wondered if Weiß were still around. In the weeks Schwarz had spent recovering from the injuries attained in the crash of the Lazarus Temple, they had heard no news of them, or of Kritiker. In the end, they had not cared, anyway. With Eszet presumably gone, Weiß had stopped being of interest to Schwarz. Schuldig had not thought of them in years.

 

“We’re lucky it took Eszet so long to elect their new leaders,” Crawford said. “If we’re lucky again, the Lazarus Stone is still with whoever got it.”

 

“What do they want with the thing, anyway?”

 

“It’s a power tool. They might not be able to work the Summoning Ritual anymore, thanks to there being no host this time, but it’s still an artifact of power.”

 

The telepath rose from the armchair and stretched. Beyond the window, the sky was pitch-black, safe for the occasional light beam that pierced it. He felt fatigue beginning to creep upon him, and longed for the comfort of a bed and a few hours of sleep. There was much he had to think about, now that this news had been revealed to him, but it would have to wait. Things were beginning to get tangled – it might not be obvious, but he could feel it. 

 

“Thomas Weyland will arrive here in two days,” Crawford said, watching Schuldig. “Before we meet with him, we’ll have a meeting with Miss Manx, and if possible, retrieve the stone. Eszet might not be able to do a lot with it, but I’d rather not see it in their hands.”

 

He nodded and walked out of the living room; there was nothing left to say. In the sparingly furnished bedroom that was his, Schuldig stripped and took a long, hot shower in the adjoining bathroom. The wound on his throat, though not deep, stung as he ran soapy hands over it; after Farfarello had left, he had sat on the floor of the loft, cursing the Irishman to hell and back. He had briefly toyed with the idea of following Farfarello, but in the end, common sense had won over burning anger and hurt pride. Farfarello had made his mind very clearly known. As it was, Schuldig had written him off for now. Perhaps later, he would talk to him again, but next time, he would be armed.

 

**January 18** **th** **, 2002, Tokyo**

**O930 Hours**

 

The morning brought cool but not cold air in from the ocean. They had a rushed breakfast before they set out, Crawford and Schuldig in Crawford’s rental BMW, Nagi on foot. The police station Crawford and Schuldig were heading to was situated between Ginza and Shintomi, in a street running parallel to the Shõwa-dori, the wide, shop-lined street that led from Ginza to Tokyo’s north, bypassing the Imperial Palace. Nagi, after waking up, had spent a good hour on the computer to glean information about the chief of police’s seat and procedure; as it was, Crawford and Schuldig were flying by the seats of their pants. They did not know if Hanae Kitada would be in the precinct.

 

Two SIG-Sauer P226 pistols rested in a combined shoulder holster against Schuldig’s ribs on either side. The guns were black, compact, semiautomatic, and each held 15 rounds of 9mm bullets, enough to blast a hole through anyone stupid enough to get on Schuldig’s case. He had mentioned to Crawford over the breakfast table that he wanted to stop at a weapon’s store to get another gun, and before they had left the apartment, the American had pulled him to the side and handed him the two guns complete with the shoulder holster. Five years ago, Schuldig had used the same brand of weapon. These guns were reliable. They were not pretty, they were not fancy, they did the job, and if it came down to it, Schuldig was one of those people who preferred usability to beauty. 

 

Crawford parked the car a little away from the police station, and they approached on foot. Both dressed in formal business suits, they looked like foreign businessmen, had it not been for Schuldig’s long, sunset-colored hair that hung down to between his shoulder blades. Self-conscious by nature after listening to what other people thought about him for years, Schuldig kept it long despite the impracticality of it. There was always the danger of someone grabbing onto it during a fight, but so far, this had happened only a few times. 

 

It was easy to take the information about Miss Hanae Kitada’s current whereabouts from the mind of the officer at the reception desk inside the police station, and easier still to persuade the man to show them the way to the stylish office on the third floor. 

 

Hanae Kitada, to say the least, was less than pleased to see them when Crawford opened the door.

 

\---

 

Schuldig leaned against the wall next to the now closed office door and crossed his arms over his chest, regarding the woman behind the large desk from under his bangs. He tapped into her mind, the first thing he encountered confusion, the second a barrage of memories, and the third anger so hot it nearly seared at the edges. Feeling vaguely satisfied that the woman he had known as Manx was indeed here, and not someplace else, the telepath left the talking to Crawford, and contended himself with listening to what went on in her mind. 

 

“How – what are _you_ doing here?” Manx asked sharply, her mouth a perfectly rounded ‘o’ of surprise as Crawford took a seat on one of the chairs in front of her desk. Her eyes were wide, but the gleam in them was more angry and surprised than afraid; Schuldig marginally respected her for that alone. 

 

“We’re here to discuss business,” Crawford said calmly.

 

“I have _nothing_ to discuss with you! Get out of my office before I have both of you arrested!”

 

“Please don’t make me use brute force, Miss Manx.”

 

“Don’t call me that!” she spat. Nevertheless, she remained in her seat, although visibly tense. Schuldig informed Crawford that she would also refrain from using the alarm button installed into the underside of her desk – for now. 

 

“You were head of the excavation team that rescued the ruins of the Lazarus Temple from the ocean. Among other things, there was one artifact, a stone tablet, brought out of the waters.”

 

Her mind was rapidly hopping back and forth, Schuldig saw. The slideshow of images passing before her and his inner eyes was fast, lingering here and there for a moment; images of the insides of the Lazarus Temple, the fear and the resolution she’d felt back then, the need to help the group she was responsible for, the brief, sudden burst of victory she had felt as her gunshot had kept Crawford from killing Aya Fujimiya and crippled Crawford’s hand instead. Then, the all-encompassing fear, the sick feeling to her stomach as she stood, at a safe distance, and watched the Lazarus Temple fall to its watery grave.

 

“I was,” Manx said slowly, her eyes narrowed. “It took me a long time to persuade them to allow me.”

 

“We would like to know where that artifact ended up. With whom, rather.” Crawford extracted a printed picture of the Lazarus Stone from the briefcase he had brought with him and slid it across her desk. “It is very important for us to know. We will not trouble you again as soon as you’ve told us its whereabouts.”

 

That, Schuldig knew, was an outright lie. As chief of police, Manx would have her hands full in the days, weeks, months to come. And this time, she would not have to go looking for trouble; trouble would be coming to her. 

 

“Why should I tell you anything?” Manx asked, looking back and forth between Crawford and Schuldig. “I can’t believe your nerve!”

 

“I can make you tell us,” Schuldig spoke up, attracting a glare from her. “Though we’d much prefer you told us of your own free will. We’re not your enemies…”

 

“…this time.” Crawford smoothly picked up where the telepath left off. “Trouble is coming to Tokyo, and it is of utmost importance that the Lazarus Stone does not fall into the wrong hands. If it hasn’t already.”

 

It was enough to make her think of whom she had handed the artifact over to, and Schuldig gleefully sorted through the information. Despite their differences, Schuldig and Crawford knew how to work together, and the telepath noted with a feeling of irony that, despite five years, they were already falling back into their old patterns. 

 

“That’s how it was called?” Manx stared at the picture in front of her, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She slid the picture back toward Crawford and leaned back in her chair, regarding the American through narrowed eyes. “I have half of a mind to try and shoot you right now.”

 

“You’re welcome to try.”

 

“I’ll tell you. But answer me a question first.” 

 

Schuldig pushed himself away from the wall and strolled over to stand behind Crawford with a slight smile on his lips. He let the American know that he had the information he wanted; Crawford replied that they would leave soon. 

 

“Why?” Manx asked.

 

Schuldig inwardly rolled his eyes. Why? The question to the universe in general. It was so cliché, but it did not surprise him. He wondered how Manx would react if he asked her why she had done what she had done, why she had cared, why she had risked her life for a group of assassins who were held together by guilt more than real affection or a sense of duty. Why she had chosen this path and become the chief of police after already going through hell once. Why she thought it justifiable to be leading this life now, after skirting around the hazy edges of the law for so long. 

 

Crawford lightly shook his head, and the telepath did not have to access the American’s mind to know he was harboring the same thoughts. 

 

“That would take too much time to explain now, Miss Manx, and time is pressing.”

 

It was Manx turn to shake her head, and there was a light smile on her lips. The scurrility of the situation was greatly amusing to Schuldig. They might as well have been discussing the weather over a cup of sake. 

 

“Omi Tsukiyono,” Manx said. 

 

“I know,” Schuldig said, grinning. The brief expression of surprise that turned into anger as it became clear to her that he had been reading her mind was short-lived on her face. Perhaps she knew that she could not have been expecting differently of him. 

 

Crawford rose from the chair and bowed slightly. They were already at the door as Manx’s voice reached them again.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because.” Schuldig said. Her dry laugh, cut off by the closing door, sounded half-amused. He latched onto her mind again and found, amidst the same confusion he had encountered the first time, a feeling that could only be described as ‘I knew it’. It was enough to make him smile.

 

\---

 

They picked Nagi up at a bus station near the Imperial Garden and took the Uchibori-dori through Kanda-Nishikichõ to Yushima. Nagi chuckled at Schuldig’s description of the meeting with Manx, and then snorted as he heard to whom the Lazarus Stone had eventually been given. 

 

“Tsukiyono…I’m amazed that kid is still around.” Nagi said from the backseat as they passed through Yushima. “The poster child for dysfunctional families…”

 

“And the heir to the considerable fortune of the Takatori empire,” Crawford said. He was sitting in the front passenger seat, a laptop open before him. Schuldig, having to concentrate on the road in front of them, caught a glimpse of a newspaper article displayed on the small screen of the laptop. “Here, listen to this – ‘Mamoru Takatori, thought dead after his abduction at the age of 6, inherits the famed Takatori Enterprises after former head of the family, Reiji Takatori, died under mysterious circumstances. Though distant relations claim him to be a fake, blood tests reveal that he is indeed who he claims to be.’”

 

“Must be nice, getting all that money,” Schuldig said. He slowed the car down as they approached a red light and lit a cigarette. “I’m surprised he went for it. His uncle and his father practically died at his hands. He’s got some guts.”

 

Mamoru Takatori, better known as Omi Tsukiyono to Schwarz, had been the leader of Weiß during their heyday. Parted from his family at an early age, he had been brought up under the tutelage of his uncle, Shuuichi Takatori, who incidentally had also been the leader of Kritiker as well as the chief of police back then. Not knowing the real identity of the man he knew only as ‘Persia’, Tsukiyono had been raised to fight crime, and eventually Persia had even gone so far as to pitch Omi and the rest of Weiß against his own brother Reiji. 

 

Back then, it had taken Schuldig a few days to figure out the tangled relationships within the Takatori family, and thinking about them now, it still amused and baffled him at the same time. Family relationships like those within the Takatori clan normally were the basis for bad soap operas. But after he had understood that Mamoru Takatori was indeed the bastard child of Shuuichi Takatori and Reiji Takatori’s wife, he had delighted in twisting the knife inside the youth even more. Feeding him bits of information, taunting him, taunting his teenage love Ouka, who then turned out to be not only a bastard child of Reiji Takatori but also Omi’s half-sister…it had been too sweet. And Schuldig had tasted and enjoyed every second of it. 

 

Weiß had never figured out that it had been mostly Schwarz meddling that eventually led them down the path to Reiji Takatori’s destruction. That the sister of another member of Weiß, the very same sister who turned out to be the host for Eszet’s plans to rule the world, had been linked to Reiji Takatori as well after he had put her into a coma, had only been the dish on the side. 

 

“According to this, Mamoru Takatori resides in the Takatori Tower these days. He spends his time investing in stocks and donating to orphanages, Third World organizations, and collecting art from all over the world.” Crawford clicked on an image, but the red light turned into a green light, and Schuldig could not see. “Hasn’t changed much, going by this photo.”

 

Nagi leaned forward and glanced over Crawford’s shoulder. “Goodness. What a goody two-shoes.”

 

They drove for another five minutes until the glass façade of the Takatori Tower shot up in front of them. Located in the heart of Uenokõen, close to Ueno Park, it was a single, majestic tower of glass and steel standing on a paved plaza surrounded by Sakura trees. Schuldig parked at the curb and gazed at the tower. He remembered all too well the thousands of times he had crossed that plaza and entered the lavishly furnished entrance hall of the Takatori Tower, and just by looking at it now, memory began to clothe the impression of the entrance hall with other, darker images. The days they had spent in the basement of that building, in a small, stuffy room Reiji Takatori had deemed worthy of them. Perhaps setting them up in such mediocre locations had been the businessman’s way of trying to show them that he was not as much of a puppet as he was in reality; Schuldig had never cared to find out. The feeling of having been insulted had evaporated with Takatori’s body. 

 

As they got out of the car, Crawford gasped and leaned against the side of it. To Schuldig, who knew the signs of a vision as he knew the sight of his own face in a mirror, the glassy, unfocused eyes of the American did not come as a surprise. Schuldig merely locked the driver’s door and walked around the car, his hands in his pocket, and waited for the American to snap out of it, while Nagi was still staring up at the Takatori Tower.

 

After a minute had passed, Crawford heaved a deep breath. “Shit. Farfarello. He’s inside.”

 

**January 18** **th** **, 2002, Tokyo**

**1057 Hours**

 

The guards in the entrance hall paid them no attention as Crawford, Nagi and Schuldig filed into the Takatori Tower amid a throng of tourists and office workers. They did not pay attention to the various signs directing toward the public display rooms of Mamoru Takatori’s extensive art collection on the second and third floor; instead taking the elevator straight to the fiftieth floor, they emerged into the quiet, cool halls that were not accessible to the public.

 

The guard in the small antechamber the elevator doors opened into was dead. He sat slumped in his chair, his arms hanging down his sides, a stump where his head used to be. Behind him, the peach-colored wall was splattered with an arc of blood; following the geometry of the arc, Schuldig saw where the head had ended up: beneath the low-hanging branches of a miniature palm tree that stood to the side of the closed door that lead into the sacred inner chambers of this part of the tower. There was an expression of severe surprise on the face, and Schuldig knew that Farfarello had simply walked up to the man and beheaded him while the guard probably still was asking for his reasons to be here. Farfarello had had a tendency to be messy in his kills five years ago. Apparently, that had not changed. 

 

“Wonderful,” Crawford said, cursing under his breath. To the side of the guard’s desk, a small array of surveillance monitors showed nothing but static. Schuldig turned to watch him check the slots of the recording devices but did not need to hear the second curse to know they were empty. Instead, Schuldig reached inside his jacket and slipped one of the guns out of its holster. 

 

“What is he doing here?” Nagi asked. He looked at the beheaded corpse with revulsion and gave it a wide berth as they walked toward the closed door. “I thought he didn’t want to be involved?”

 

“Must’ve changed his mind,” Schuldig said, holding a hand up to silence the other two. He closed his eyes and extended a mental net into the rooms beyond the closed door. Unsurprised at the lack of conscious thought, he finally encountered a single mind. Fear, so tangible he could taste it on the back of his tongue like a dollop of oil and sugar, told him exactly what he needed to know. “Seems like Farfarello has Tsukiyono cornered in his office.”

 

Crawford, one hand on the door handle, the other holding a gun up close to his right shoulder, sighed. 

 

\---

 

They encountered more corpses as they made their way down the carpeted corridor all of them remembered well. As the guard in the front room, most of them beheaded, a few simply stabbed to the heart or the throat. Schuldig grimaced as he heard the carpet squelch beneath the soles of his shoes as he stepped through a puddle of blood – the walls of the corridor looked as though someone had filled buckets of red pain into a water pistol and then went berserk on them. 

 

Beneath the revulsion ran a steady undercurrent of slowly simmering anger. He was angry with Farfarello to begin with, but this just added to the score. Farfarello always had had a talent for making things difficult, whether it was in dealing with him personally or being out on an assignment with him. Schuldig had often enjoyed the Irishman’s little quirks, seeing that they had brought him more entertainment and made many a dull task a bloody and exciting one, but right now, he was simply irritated. His ego still smarted at having practically been thrown out of the Seventh Serpent yesterday. 

 

And ironically enough, he was angry at the fact that Farfarello had come here before them. That, indeed, he had again managed to outsmart or simply evade Crawford’s visionary powers. Schuldig knew from extensive experience that the Irishman was as invisible to Crawford’s powers as he was to Schuldig’s telepathy – what Crawford had seen at the car had been a vision of Tsukiyono cowering behind his desk or slowly bleeding dry, most likely. He had been certain the Irishman would have resorted to further moping – because that was what he had been doing yesterday, Schuldig told himself – instead of actively messing with things – and that was what he was doing right now, if the screams coming from behind the closed door at the end of the corridor were any indication. Schuldig flipped the safety off on his gun and cocked the hammer back. Crawford pressed himself against the left side of the door, Schuldig took the other side. Nagi, an expression of utter concentration on his face, stopped a little behind Schuldig. 

 

The door gave under Nagi’s Gift with a groan of wood and a splintering as the telekinetic blasted it into the room with a single shove of his powers. Schuldig found himself hoping that Farfarello, in the last five years, had not suddenly resorted to using guns instead of knives as he stormed into the office and trained his own aim on the first moving target he saw. Crawford was at his side in a heartbeat, and from behind them, Schuldig could feel the same powers Nagi had just used to destroy a door form a protective shield around them.

 

In front of them, Farfarello calmly drew the edge of the knife he held in his hand across Omi Tsukiyono’s throat. The blade was so sharp that at first, nothing happened. Then, almost like a mouth, an obscenely red line opened from Tsukiyono’s one ear to the other, blood gushing from severed arteries onto the young man’s front and the desk he sat behind, and with a sound defying all description, Tsukiyono’s entire head tipped backward on its neck, giving them all a clear view of the vertebrae of his spine before those flat disks parted too, and the dull thud of the head hitting the floor marked the end of Mamoru Takatori, Omi Tsukiyono, and the late leader of Weiß. 

 

Farfarello lifted the blood-streaked blade to his mouth and sniffed on the blood. “Fancy meeting you here.”

 

Schuldig felt the healing wound across his throat sing in phantom pain once as his mind took in the fate of Tsukiyono. He kept his gun trained on the Irishman, trying to think of something to say. 

 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Crawford shouted. 

 

“I could ask you the same thing,” Farfarello answered calmly. He stepped out behind the chair that now held a headless corpse and sat down on the edge of the desk. Without paying any actual attention to the guns still trained on him, Farfarello reached out toward something that sat in the middle of the desk and lifted it. “Look at what I found.” 

 

Despite a generous amount of blood dripping from it, Schuldig recognized the Lazarus Stone. He would recognize that flat, sandy stone anywhere in the world – its surface marked by arcane symbols, it did not look like much. Only if one knew of its history did it acquire status, and even then, it took believing minds to make that status something worthwhile. Schuldig was one of these believers. He had seen the powers unleashed through the Lazarus Stone, had felt its effects on his own body.

 

Had nearly died because of it. 

 

Crawford lowered his gun and hissed something at Nagi that escaped Schuldig. A moment later, the telekinetic shield, visible as a slight distortion in the air to Schuldig’s eyes, faded. He lowered his gun as well, his eyes trained on the Irishman, who stared back at him, a slight smile playing around Farfarello’s lips. 

 

“Give me that stone, Farfarello,” Crawford said slowly and stepped forward.

 

“Of course.” The Irishman held the dripping stone out at arm’s length. His slight smile turned into a grin as Crawford snatched it from his hand; with a lazy stretch, Farfarello rose from his seat and wandered along the windows behind the desk, absent-mindedly wiping the blood off on his leather pants. 

 

“How did you know?” Schuldig asked quietly, following Farfarello’s moves with his eyes.

 

“I knew it all along, oh Mastermind. You forget that other than you all, I _stayed_ here. I know what’s going on in this city.”

 

The name brought a sour scowl to Schuldig’s face. Mastermind had been his codename during the time of Schwarz; it was a stupid name on top of a cliché, and Schuldig had hated it for as long as someone addressed him with it. He paid no attention to Crawford and Nagi as they searched for something to wipe the blood off the Lazarus Stone; instead, he stalked over to Farfarello. 

 

“Knew it and didn’t tell us. You could’ve saved us a lot of time if you’d told us.”

 

“You didn’t ask,” came the light reply. “It was actually Crawford who gave me the idea. I just waited for the right moment.”

 

Schuldig turned his head and looked at Crawford, who nodded grimly. “I’d given him a call before I went to meet you in Venice. He told me he didn’t know what had happened to the stone or where it was.”

 

Schuldig turned back to Farfarello and found that the man had meanwhile wandered to the wall to Schuldig’s left. For a moment, Schuldig felt something nagging at the back of his mind. Something he should be remembering here and now, but did not remember. Writing it off to the general confusion and the anger he was feeling, he turned to face the Irishman again.

 

“Since when did you become a liar, Farfarello?”

 

“Not a liar. I merely withheld information. Something Crawford _and_ you should be familiar with.”

 

“For fuck’s sake, stop with the games! Are you trying to pay us back for how we treated you? Is that it?” Schuldig shouted. “Well, I can tell you one thing, it’s not working!”

 

The expression that passed Farfarello’s face was something he had never thought he would see again after seeing it once. It had been during their last months in Tokyo, five years ago, when, through some twisted quirk of fate – and when was fate ever _not_ twisted – Farfarello’s mother had found her way to Tokyo. It had been visible on that pale oval of a face for the barest of moments – an expression of hurt, of pain, of twenty years of delusional thinking all mixed into one. It had been on Farfarello’s face as he looked at the corpse of his mother.

 

And just like back then, it vanished as quickly as it had come.

 

“Schuldig!” Nagi suddenly shouted from behind him. “He’s leaning against -” 

 

The wall behind Farfarello gave under his weight and swallowed him. Schuldig cursed and sprang forward, letting his gun drop as he wound his fingers around the edge of the moving panels to keep them from closing, knowing that _this_ was what he had been trying to remember a few minutes ago. He pulled his hands back just in time to avoid having them squashed, the mechanics that turned the hidden door to strong for him to fight against. 

 

With a loud snapping not unlike the jaws of some giant monster snapping together, the moving part of the wall slid back into place and turned into unremarkable wooden paneling. Schuldig heard the sound of a lock sliding into place on the other side of the paneling and cursed; he knew now that Farfarello, unlike them, had not come in through the elevator. He had most likely taken the secret passage ways that were carved into the Takatori Tower like the holes were carved into Swiss Cheese, and knocked Tsukiyono out long enough for him to leisurely murder his way toward the guard’s room. 

 

“Schuldig, leave it be,” Crawford said with exasperation as the telepath picked his gun up from the floor. “We have the stone.”

 

Schuldig clenched his fingers around the handle of the gun and shoved it back into its holster. 

 

They briefly went through the office, and discovered a molten mess in a metal wastebasket beneath the desk. From the stench rising from the basket, Schuldig knew Farfarello had used acid to dissolve the surveillance tapes from the guard’s monitors. Ignoring the bloody mess in the chair behind the desk, Schuldig stepped around the chair and looked at the head where it had fallen to the ground, one side of the face pressing against the carpet. The expression on this one was no surprise – it was agony, carved forever now, or nearly forever, into the features of Omi Tsukiyono’s face. 

 

He would have liked to have a ‘chat’ with the boy. He would have liked to find out what had happened to the rest of Weiß – given the fact that Tsukiyono had survived the fall of the Lazarus Temple, it would not have surprised Schuldig if the other three had made it out alive as well. Now he could not ask him anymore, and…

 

…that meant he would simply have to ask Farfarello, no?

 

Ignoring Crawford’s raised eyebrow at the angered grin on his lips, Schuldig snatched the briefcase now containing the Lazarus Stone from Crawford’s hand and stalked back into the guardroom. He had plans.

 

**January 18** **th** **, 2002, Tokyo**

**1423 Hours**

 

“It really doesn’t look like much, does it?” Nagi asked, leaning on his elbows on the kitchen table in their apartment, his chin cradled in his hands. “To think that this stupid slab of stone holds such power is amazing. I never understood it.”

 

Schuldig looked up from cleaning the two guns, an oiled cloth in one hand. “What don’t you understand?” 

 

“This thing. How come it holds so much power?” Nagi reached out and gave the Lazarus stone a little nudge. It lay in the middle of the kitchen table on a dishrag to dry after they had washed the residue of the blood off it. “It’s just a piece of stone.”

 

Crawford returned from the living room and sat down on the other side of the table, a newspaper under his arm. “It’s more than that. Personally I think most of what’s been said about the stone is superstition and hearsay, but we all saw how much power it held five years ago.”

 

“They say the stone has been carved from the stone grave of Lazarus of Bethany.” Schuldig slid back the sled of the gun he was working on and cleaned the bullet compartment with an edge of the cloth. “Funny to think that an organization like Eszet would believe stuff that’s been written down in the greatest fairytales of all times. Then again, there’s a grain of truth in every story…”

 

“Who was Lazarus of Bethany?” Nagi asked, sitting back. 

 

“He’s a character in the Bible,” Crawford explained. “Lazarus of Bethany was a man said to have been brought back from the dead by Jesus Christ. Legend has it the Lazarus Stone was carved from the door of his stone tomb after Jesus touched that stone.” The American spread the newspaper in front of him. “Well, I was also told that Jesus Christ was a freak just like the one Eszet had tried to resurrect five years ago.”

 

“Sounds like a bunch of crap to me,” Nagi said, eyebrows raised. He gave the stone another nudge and then a short sigh of annoyance as Crawford reached over and slid the stone out of Nagi’s reach.

 

“Under the right circumstances, in the right hands and at the right time, the stone can be very powerful,” Schuldig said as he slid the magazine back into the now cleaned weapon. “What are we going to do with it?”

 

“It would be easy to destroy it,” Crawford said, his eyes glued to the newspaper. Schuldig caught himself waiting for the moment when the American’s hand would rise to push the glasses back up his nose to their proper spot, only to then remember that Crawford was not bespectacled anymore. “Before we do that, however, I want Weyland to take a look at it.”

 

Nagi and Crawford looked up as Schuldig rose from the chair. The telepath slid the two SIG-Sauer guns into the shoulder holster and tossed the oiled cloth into the wastebasket before he washed his hands at the sink. 

 

“Where are you going?” Nagi asked.

 

Schuldig gave the young man a slight smile as he headed for the door. As he was about to step out, he caught sight of Crawford’s face. The American’s eyes were unfocused, meaning he had another vision. Schuldig waited until Crawford retained his sense of self again. As Crawford then only picked up his newspaper, Schuldig shrugged and walked out. It could not have been important if Crawford had not told them.

 

\---

 

He did not directly go to the Seventh Serpent; instead, Schuldig visited a few of the places he still remembered from five years ago. While Crawford and Schuldig had paid Manx a visit this morning, Nagi had contacted some of the people he had been familiar with during his time as Schwarz’s hacker. These contacts did not interest Schuldig. Although he knew his way around a computer and could probably have figured out some of the stuff Nagi did, all he had ever done with them was sending a few emails and reading information off the screen. And that was where his interest in them ended. Being what he was, the face-to-face contact with people was more entertaining to him than the anonymous wasteland of the Internet could ever be. 

 

Schuldig took a bus to Shinjuku East and went on foot from there on. His way took him to the lesser frequented streets of Tokyo’s ‘playground’ – in both East and West Shinjuku, as well as in the neighboring districts Roppongi, Shibuya and Harajuku, there was little of the old architectural wonders that made Tokyo so interesting to tourists to be seen. These five districts were more tailored to the needs of the children of the night, leaving aside the Olympic grounds in Yoyogi Park and the impressive twin towers of Tokyo’s administration in Shinjuku West. Despite the early hour – Schuldig had learned long ago that if one was in search of _real_ entertainment, midnight and onwards was a good time to be visiting the ‘playground’ – he found them again: the illicit little bars hidden between the stylish, new-age bars and night clubs with their cosmopolitan flair, the _pachinko_ [1] salons, and the brothels without a name. 

 

He was let into all of them. Where a bouncer or an irate barkeeper tried to keep him out, he used his Gift to gain entrance to the place of choice. Where a group of men sitting around a table regarded him suspiciously, he calmed their fears with the gift of oblivion – masking himself had been one of the very first things he had learned at Rosenkreuz, all those years in the past. He became the long-time customer who was welcomed with open arms, he became the distant but trusted business associate whom one whispered rumors and secrets to; he fucked them over left and right when it suited him, gleaning bits and pieces of information he fit together into a larger picture. 

 

Six hours after he had started his little tour of the ‘playground’, Schuldig knew more about what went on where in Tokyo’s underground than Nagi could ever have learned through his hacker friends. This was the merit of being a telepath – it was not as much as constantly raping minds, but listening to them. A nudge here and there, a whispered word that birthed the information Schuldig desired, a train of thought derailed at the station and sent another way to arrive where he wanted it. 

 

He made one more stop of the business nature, and purchased an item from an old man in a store hidden away in the darkest streets of Roppongi, which he had wrapped in bright blue paper by a frazzled shop clerk in a large shopping mall. Then he bought a newspaper, chose a small restaurant, and had dinner. 

 

Despite his still-simmering anger at Farfarello, Schuldig knew he was also looking forward to seeing the Irishman. There had always been a certain kind of ‘chemistry’ between them; five years ago, this chemistry had consisted of a mutual love for trouble and blood. Of what it consisted now, Schuldig did not know. Not being able to read Farfarello’s mind made talking to the Irishman almost an adventure: one never knew if Farfarello answered normally, or if he whipped out a knife from one moment to the other. 

 

He could not pinpoint the exact time when it happened, but somewhere near the end of their dream, Schuldig had begun to feel old and used. Maybe it had been the heritage of too many nights spent out in the city, maybe it had been the endless reruns of procedure long since collecting the fine dust of boredom, and most likely, he had just been fed up with everything. Each day that passed had brought them one step closer to the fulfillment of what Nagi had fittingly termed ‘dream’ – and that it had been, nothing more but a dream wishing to be brought to fruition by four young men who, by definition, should have been denied the ability to dream. They had ended so many others.

 

When he had something to do, it had all been good and fine; then he could concentrate on the task and forget that they were running toward their own doom with open eyes and spread arms. It had begun to stop being of importance where and how he was running, so as long as he _was_ running; staying still meant looking at what his life was and coming to the conclusion that he was a fool, a liar, and generally a bastard with a capital ‘B’ with a life expectancy that back then had equaled zero, and currently didn’t look any better. 

 

When he had been out on a task with Farfarello, he almost felt alive again. The Irishman had a taste for blood and trouble that at times rivaled his own; if Schuldig was a bastard with a capital ‘B’ then Farfarello was trouble with a capital ‘T’. Schuldig would pick random victims and hunt them, twisting their thoughts around until they didn’t know anymore which way was up and which was down, waiting for the sweet moment when their agony and pain sang in his mind like an astral voice fleeing all definition, striking them down like a snake hiding in the high grass before the moment dulled and he was left with the ruins of excitement. Then, and only then, had he felt like he was something, someone with a purpose in life. That his purpose had generally brought the life expectancy of others down a few notches meant little to him – Schuldig judged others freely and expected them to do the same, and so far, no judgment had been passed, other than a comment, a scream, or a thought condemning him to hell and back when he had stepped away and left a hapless victim to Farfarello’s sadistic urges. 

 

Sometimes he had wondered if the others felt the same. Most times, he had not cared, leaving them to their own little hells that seemed as insubstantial as his own did. Nagi hadn’t seemed to care either way, the youth had lost something the day that girl died, taking with her a glow that had lightened midnight blue eyes before; he had spent most of his time perched at his desk, fingers flying over the keys of his computer. 

 

Crawford, back then, never changed, never lost that confident smile that cut deeper than a knife ever could, never faltered, unerringly working toward their dream. The relationship between Schuldig and Crawford had cooled considerably after the ‘Ouka incident’, which had brought them into a world of trouble with their then-boss Reiji Takatori and Schuldig into a world of pain as said boss took a golf club to the telepath and Farfarello, breaking Schuldig’s jaw and putting a dent into Schuldig’s pride. That dent had hurt far more than the broken bone. 

 

Farfarello had been a slave of echoes with a few moments of lucidity that allowed Schuldig to talk to him as one would talk to a friend, but overall, Farfarello had lived in a world of muted whispers from a past he had created himself, and everything else but the Irishman’s precious and much-hated God had been secondary.

 

This did not seem to be the case anymore. For that reason alone, Schuldig was determined to spend a little more time with the Irishman, provided said Irishman was going to tolerate him. Schuldig’s fingers touched the wrapped item that lay next to his sake cup on the table and grinned. Maybe it was a cheap shot, but it he had never been one _not_ to try.

 

\---

 

Schuldig arrived at the Seventh Serpent a few hours before midnight. As he had been expecting it, there was the same line of waiting people to get inside as yesterday. Again, he readied himself to gently mind-rape the bouncers into letting him inside; he was pleasantly surprised as they simply waved him through. 

 

The bar was as tightly packed as it had been before. This time though, there seemed to be an air of uneasiness around, something oppressing. Although Schuldig had read the highly amusing report of the late Takatori getting so gruesomely murdered as well as watched the evening news in one of the bars he had frequented on his way here, he knew it was something different that hung in the air as soon as he made his way through the throngs of people. Even the gyrating dancers on the dance floor seemed to feel it, moving with less enthusiasm as they had yesterday. 

 

He spotted Farfarello amid a cluster of tables set up near the stairs leading up to the loft as soon as he arrived at the bar. Although the Irishman sat with his back turned to the entrance, he turned around and immediately saw Schuldig. From the tight, grim features of the Irishman’s face, Schuldig knew that something was up. He refrained from reading anyone’s thoughts, wanting to hear whatever had happened from Farfarello himself – provided the man was going to talk to him, because Farfarello turned back around after staring at Schuldig for a moment.

 

He ordered a drink from an absent-minded looking barkeeper and took a seat at the bar, sitting, once again, with his back turned to it. Younger folks occupied the tables to his left, which yesterday had been occupied by the same kind of people Schuldig had just spent the last hours making contact with. Everyone above a certain age level seemed to have migrated toward the right side of the bar, and more specifically, to the cluster of tables where Farfarello sat surrounded by what Schuldig knew where people the Irishman dealt with on a daily basis. No one willingly got too close to Farfarello unless one had no other choice. The man had managed to make trained assassins take a step back by simply smiling during Schwarz’s heyday. 

 

Curiosity won out in the end. Schuldig turned his attention on the two people who sat closest to the Irishman and listened in on their thoughts, encountering anger and indignation, shock and helplessness. 

 

Someone had died. 

 

Farfarello rose from his chair as Schuldig had half-finished his drink, and walked up the stairs to the loft. He left the door open and sent Schuldig a long glance before he disappeared out of sight.

 

“So much for a friendly welcome,” the telepath muttered to himself as he cradled his glass against his chest and followed Farfarello. He ignored the muted whispers from the crowd around the tables as he walked up the stairs; a few random dips into a few random minds told him that Farfarello had told them Schuldig was ‘a friend’. Well, it was better than being introduced as ‘that asshole from five years ago’. 

 

Farfarello was nowhere to be seen in the large main room of the loft Schuldig had talked to him in yesterday. The telepath closed the door, leisurely strolled over to the two doors to his right and walked into a comfortable living room. The windows hung with long, thick curtains, Schuldig discovered that few things inside the living room were _not_ black. The table, the couch, the armchairs – even the carpet was black. He let his gaze wander over the left wall, taken up by a single large bookshelf. To his right, a mini-bar – of course, also black – took up the wall. Farfarello stood behind that bar and filled a glass with wine. 

 

“So, who died?” Schuldig asked nonchalantly and walked to the next armchair. Comfortable. He felt his weight sink into the leather and sighed; being a hedonist at heart, Schuldig could appreciate this small comfort even during times when his attention should be elsewhere. 

 

“Nagumo,” Farfarello answered. He did not look at the telepath as he put the bottle of wine back under the bar and walked out from behind it, a long-stemmed wine glass in hand. 

 

Schuldig took the news in with a pursed mouth. Although he knew that Nagumo and Farfarello had not been lovers, he wondered how close their relationship had really been. Both times he had dealt with Nagumo on a personal basis, the young man had treated him as though Schuldig was an old lover of Farfarello’s who had suddenly decided to make an appearance, regardless of what Farfarello had told him about Nagumo thinking of him as a bad omen. Schuldig wondered what, if anything, Farfarello had told those he worked with now about his past.

 

Finally, he just asked, “Really? How?”

 

The Irishman walked over and sat down opposite Schuldig, one leg folded beneath him. He sipped his wine thoughtfully, eye focused on something only he could see. Schuldig did not press him. Instead, he continued exploring the living room with his eyes. The walls were painted a light gray; bladed weapons hung randomly on them, some of which took Schuldig a while to figure out. One in particular caught his interest: a solid, metal rod of maybe five feet length, wound with leather straps in the middle. On either end, a narrow, two-edged blade protruded for a good one and a half feet. It looked like a spear with two heads. The leather straps looked as though the weapon had been in use, often, and maybe even just recently. 

 

“Executed Eszet-style,” Farfarello said softly. He swilled the wine in its glass and sucked his lower lip in between his teeth. 

 

Executed Eszet-style meant eyes gouged out, tongue cut out, the body tied into a fetal position. The gritty analog to the unseeing, ungifted Homo Sapiens Eszet and its affiliates were proud not to be a part of. During his time in Schwarz, Schuldig had seen this particular style of execution only twice, and both times it had been Crawford’s handiwork, but he knew only Eszet would go to the lengths of such a style. 

 

He leaned forward and put his glass down on the coffee table between them. Farfarello watched the movement of his hand from under lowered brows, the first drops of blood appearing on the tender flesh where his teeth were digging into his lower lip. 

 

“When did you find out?” Schuldig asked. 

 

“Shortly after I returned from our…unscheduled meeting in the tower.” The lower lip was released, and Schuldig caught a glimpse of teeth stained a faint crimson. “He was supposed to watch over a delivery at Tokyo Harbor.”

 

“Delivery?”

 

“Narcotics.”

 

“You deal in drugs?” Schuldig asked, both eyebrows raised. 

 

“I deal in everything that gets me through the day,” Farfarello said sharply. “Drugs, weapons, death – I don’t care.”

 

Schuldig caught himself wanting to make a biting comment about Farfarello’s ‘business’ now as opposed to Farfarello’s hatred for the drugs Schwarz had used to keep him calm five years ago, and swallowed it. From the slightly raised voice of the Irishman alone Schuldig knew they were heading toward another bitching fest, and that was not what he wanted. As much as he longed to pay the Irishman back for earlier this morning and yesterday’s snotty dismissal, the news about someone so close to Farfarello having been executed Eszet-style were more interesting. 

 

Farfarello seemed to harbor similar thoughts. He drained his wine in one swallow and set the glass down on the table, rubbing his hands over his face with a tired sigh. 

 

“Do you think it was coincidence?” 

 

“I don’t know,” Schuldig said. “How much did Crawford tell you about what Eszet is planning?”

 

“Enough. I know they’re coming here. I know some of them already _are_ here.”

 

“Really?”

 

“There are rumors.” Another sigh. “Some politicians suddenly backed by unknown sources. Some mob bosses turning up killed in ways only a Gifted can kill. The odd _gaijin_ [2] here and there asking strange questions and knowing more than they let on.”

 

Schuldig nodded. It was so pure Eszet. They didn’t simply appear on the scene; Eszet planned years, sometimes decades ahead and sent its ‘moles’ out instead – Schwarz had been, all things considered, such a group of moles. They called them way makers and wave breakers. They paved the road for Eszet to walk later. Only that instead of paving the road, Schwarz had meticulously dug a deep hole into the middle of it and covered it with lies, and then waited for Eszet to fall into that hole. 

 

“Crawford is a fool if he thinks he can go against them,” Farfarello said darkly. 

 

“We won’t be standing alone, Far,” Schuldig said. “In two days, Thomas Weyland will come here.”

 

“Who is that?”

 

“He used to be the leader of Rosenkreuz after Crawford and I left. Now he’s opposing the new Eszet leaders. Seems as though some people finally got the wake-up call they needed.” Schuldig shook a cigarette out of his pack and looked around for an ashtray until Farfarello stood and retrieved one from behind the bar. “Thanks. According to Crawford, Weyland has a large group of people standing behind him who want Eszet as an organization destroyed as much as we do.”

 

“How did Crawford get into contact with him?”

 

“He didn’t tell.” He exhaled a stream of smoke, Farfarello’s doubtful expression not escaping him. “Would you answer me a question without threatening to cut another smile into me?”

 

“Depends on the question.”

 

“What happened to God?”

 

For a moment, Farfarello froze. Schuldig felt his muscles tense and prepared to fling himself to the side and over the arm of the armchair in case the Irishman flung himself at _him_. Then, though, Farfarello chuckled dryly and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. 

 

“He died.”

 

Receiving no further explanation, Schuldig shrugged and relaxed again. He remembered the item he had bought and slipped it out of the inside pocket of his jacket, giving Farfarello a clear view of the SIG-Sauer resting against his left side. Farfarello frowned slightly as Schuldig handed him the small package.

 

“What is that?”

 

“Unwrap it and know?”

 

The Irishman gave Schuldig another frown but did as he was told. Then he sat and stared at the item. Schuldig could not keep from grinning.

 

“You aren’t wearing one now. I was wondering what happened to the old one.”

 

Farfarello snorted, but Schuldig could see him trying to keep from grinning as well. Farfarello could be such a child at times – or at least had been, back then. Schuldig remembered the childlike glee on the Irishman’s face during or after a particular gruesome killing – those smiles had been soft and gentle, not unlike the one he was trying to hide now. Farfarello turned the black leather collar Schuldig had bought over in his hands and finally opened the buckle. He slid it around his neck, and Schuldig again found himself wanting to touch the long hair that tumbled over Farfarello’s shoulders. 

 

“I thought of you, once in a while.”

 

Farfarello’s hands stopped what they were doing as he lifted his head to look at Schuldig. The telepath took another drag on his cigarette and studied Farfarello’s face, trying to gauge the reaction he had caused. 

 

“Did you?” 

 

“Yeah. Mostly when I was bored out of my mind. We had a way of keeping ourselves entertained, remember?”

 

Farfarello nodded and placed his hands down on his lap, frowning again. He seemed to be searching for something to say, or rather, for a way of how to say what he had in mind, and Schuldig used the quiet moment to kill the current cigarette and light another one. His throat would be killing him for it later, but at least it gave him something to do. He had the distinct feeling that otherwise, long uncomfortable silences would stretch between them. The slender leather collar looked good around Farfarello’s neck for reasons Schuldig could not quite determine himself. Maybe it was just the fact that he had been so used to seeing the Irishman with one that seeing him without one had disturbed him. 

 

“I was angry,” Farfarello said after a minute. “Angry and…hurt, for lack of better wording. I wake up one morning, if you can call it waking up considering Crawford seemed to have pumped every drug he could find into me the evening before, and you’re all gone. No note, nothing.”

 

Schuldig tried to remember the last few weeks of his time in Schwarz. He had spent more and more time away from their communal apartment, in fact, in the end he had come ‘home’ only for a change of clothing most of the time. Now that he thought back on it, he also remembered that on the few times he had been home, he had rarely seen the Irishman.

 

“Crawford had left the door to my room open,” Farfarello went on, oblivious to Schuldig’s reminiscing. “His, your and Nagi’s rooms were empty. You’d all left without even saying good-bye. He left me an envelope with money on the kitchen table. It wouldn’t even have covered a month’s rent.”

 

“I was the first to go,” Schuldig said quietly. While he did not feel any remorse for leaving without saying good-bye, he could understand why Farfarello had been – and maybe even still was, considering he was talking about it – so upset about it. 

 

Farfarello nodded. “You always were the restless one.” He leaned back against the armchair.

 

“Is that why you are so upset about Crawford, Nagi and me suddenly reappearing?” Schuldig lifted his glass and drained it, then nodded as Farfarello pointed at his wine glass. The Irishman rose and walked to the bar, taking a second wine glass from a cupboard.

 

“Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is that it took me half a year to get the drugs out of my system. Another six months to be able to afford a place where I could sleep. I didn’t walk away from it all; I was left behind _in_ it all.” Farfarello retrieved the bottle of wine from under the bar and carried it back to the coffee table with the glass. He sat back down and poured Schuldig a glass. “I was Schwarz one day, the next morning, I wasn’t. I think that would rip the rug out from under anyone. I spent the first year hiding from Kritiker while they raided the city and tried to kill as many agents Eszet had left behind as possible.” 

 

“Why didn’t you stay at the apartment?”

 

“I wanted to. Three days after Crawford had left Eszet agents raided the place. Coincidentally, Kritiker popped up on the doorstep the same day. I let them kill each other and watched from a distance.”

 

“Are they still around?” Schuldig accepted the wine and sniffed it, feeling the heavy bouquet go straight to his brain. 

 

“Kritiker?” Farfarello shrugged. “Who knows? If they are, then they’re operating too secretly to make their presence known. Omi Tsukiyono was the only member of Weiß I knew stayed in Tokyo. I don’t know where the other three are.”

 

“Manx is chief of police now.”

 

“I know. I see her on TV occasionally. I even played with the idea of going out and killing her, but I’ll do that when there’s nothing else to do.”

 

Knowing the human psyche inside out, Schuldig knew now why Farfarello had pulled the stunt in the Takatori Tower. It had not been an act of defiance or trying to disrupt their plans, it had been something far simpler: an act of revenge, carried out on a miniscule scale. He admitted freely to himself that despite the entertainment he had had with Farfarello back then, he had never thought the Irishman capable of achieving what he had achieved – much less seeing him own a bar and not rant about God every waking hour. Farfarello so suddenly appearing in the Takatori Tower had thrown them for a loop. It was probably what the Irishman had been aiming for: a nice, little ‘fuck you’ for all the times they, and Crawford in particular, had treated him like a dog on a leash. Going at it from that angle, it was also understandable why Farfarello reacted to the American oracle like a bull to a Matador waving a piece of cloth around. 

 

He took a sip of the wine and then regarded Farfarello over the rim of the glass as the Irishman asked, “Why are you back in it?”

 

“I’m bored,” Schuldig said in a lazy drawl. He laughed at the deadpan expression on Farfarello’s face. “Were you expecting differently?”

 

“Not really. I’m just surprised that you’re back in it, seeing that you’re not bound by anything. None of us owe one another anything.”

 

That gave Schuldig pause. While he did see certain merits in Crawford’s plan to wipe out Eszet once and for all, Farfarello had a point there. Had he truly been so bored that all it took to shake him from it were a few words about revenge? 

 

There was a sharp knock on the door to the living room. Farfarello excused himself and left. Schuldig listened to his footsteps as much as he could considering the music from the bar seemed unnaturally loud after the prolonged semi-silence they had been sitting in. The walls up here were probably soundproofed. He let his eyes wander over the interior of the room again but found nothing that held his interest for longer than a glance. 

 

He kept turning Farfarello’s words over in his mind – why was he here? For that matter, why was Nagi here? True, Crawford and Nagi’s relationship had been different from the start – it had been more of a father and son relationship, with a few loopholes for either side thrown in, but that was it. And Schuldig? With his devil-may-care attitude he had spent so many years perfecting? It was not for the sake of old times, that much he knew. And while Nagi may have been moved to help Crawford out of sentimental reasons or just ‘for old time’s sake’, none of this applied to the telepath. He could not have cared less for what had happened to Crawford’s wife and daughter. They had not been his.

 

Perhaps, he thought with a small smirk, it was to right old wrongs. They had not managed to completely wipe out Eszet five years ago. Perhaps the chance to try for a second time really had been enough to shake him from his boredom, his endless travels across the planet. 

 

“That’s a new one,” Schuldig muttered to himself and drained the glass. He found himself thinking about what Farfarello had said a few minutes ago. How all of them leaving had more or less left the Irishman swimming. Leaving aside the obvious drug addiction Farfarello had had to get rid of, Schuldig suspected that Schwarz as a whole had meant more to Farfarello than he had ever let on or was willing to let on even now, after five years. Even the most crazed, sadistic killer needed something to believe in, something to shelter him. While Schwarz may not have been what a normal person would call a family, the four of them had nevertheless relied on each other and risked their lives together to the very end. 

 

And considering the fact that they had often sent Farfarello into situations no normal person would ever come out of alive as a distraction for the enemy party, he could understand how the Irishman had felt. Used and abused and finally left behind. 

 

Well, he would have to get over it, Schuldig thought as he listened to the rhythmic thumping sound of the music through the half-open door. It was almost harmonious with his heartbeat. Thump-thump-thump- _bang_ -thump.

 

_Bang?_

 

\---

 

Schuldig stopped at the head of the stairs and ducked low a moment later as he saw chaos break loose in the bar below him. The dancers on the dance floor were screaming and swarming toward the exit like a herd of scared sheep; people were falling and others trampled over them. At the foot of the stairs, the group of men and women who had sat around Farfarello had risen from their chairs. He saw drawn guns and saw some of the bolder men begin to move toward the bar, from where the gunshot had apparently come. 

 

At the bar, Farfarello stood with his back to Schuldig at the loft. Over the din of the screaming dancers, Schuldig could not hear a single word of what was shouted, despite the fact that a barkeeper or the DJ had stopped the music the moment Schuldig had stepped out of the door. Two burly men stood in front of Farfarello. Foreigners. American or European. Schuldig ducked behind the railing of the stairs and pulled one of the guns out of its holster. Farfarello stood ramrod-straight, but even from his elevated vantage point Schuldig could see that the Irishman was in fact trembling with rage. The man standing closest to Farfarello was holding a gun pressed against the Irishman’s shoulder or chest. Schuldig dipped into the thoughts of one of the men facing Farfarello but heard only garbled nonsense – it could have been Russian or Polish, Schuldig did not know. He did not speak either language. From the coloring of the thoughts alone, though, he could surmise that both men were here on business. From the second man, he picked up an image of a ship and the surroundings of the Tokyo Harbor.

 

Men from the narcotics shipment Farfarello had spoken about? Schuldig narrowed his eyes and cursed the fact that he could not read the Irishman’s mind. His attention was diverted from the scene as a middle-aged man at the foot of the stairs hissed at him to come down.

 

“Who is that?” Schuldig asked as soon as he stood amid the throng of people.

 

“The owner of the shipment we were supposed to buy this morning,” the man who had hissed at Schuldig answered. He introduced himself as Saikaku and did not inquire about Schuldig’s name. Apparently, the fact alone that Farfarello was on speaking terms with Schuldig was enough for these people to leave Schuldig alone. “Russians. Farfarello didn’t buy after Nagumo was killed. It seems they’re angry about that.”

 

No kidding, Schuldig thought. He cocked the hammer of the gun back and strained to hear more of the two men’s thoughts. In less than two minutes, the dancers had cleared the scene, and those who left behind on the floor would not be getting up anytime soon. 

 

The two men in front of Farfarello were shouting at the Irishman. Schuldig did not understand a word of what they were saying, but apparently, Farfarello did, for he answered them in kind, only that his own voice never rose above a certain level. Schuldig recognized that level.

 

A second gunshot rang out as Farfarello suddenly slammed his hand into the arm of the man who held the gun to his chest and kicked at the man’s gut, which caused him to drop the gun and curl his arms around his middle. As he hunched over, the second man attempted to tackle the Irishman to the ground, only to reach for empty space as Farfarello darted to the side and delivered a cracking punch to the second man’s head, which caused him to crash against the bar with an audible sound of pain. Farfarello grabbed a handful of hair and yanked the man’s head toward himself; Schuldig heard the sickening crunch of metal sinking through bone and watched as the man fell to the floor with a heavy thud, a small knife handle protruding from the side of his skull. The man who had held the gun to Farfarello coughed and then uttered a grunt as Farfarello stepped behind him and put one knee on the man’s back to keep him in his hunched position.

 

The Irishman hissed a few words and stepped back, delivering a kick to the hunched man’s butt that toppled him forward onto his hands and knees. Now that Farfarello was facing him, Schuldig saw that the Irishman’s front was wet – bloody, to be more specific, the material of his black T-shirt sticking to his skin from his left shoulder on downward. Two of the men around Schuldig stepped forward and took hold of the corpse. The Russian whom Farfarello had left alive scrambled to his feet; speaking so fast spittle flew from his mouth. Schuldig did not need to understand the language to know that he was damning and cursing Farfarello, to which the Irishman reacted with nothing but a contemptuous glare. 

 

“Get him back to his ship,” Farfarello said in Japanese. “And sink it.”

 

Two more men stepped forward, both with drawn weapons. The Russian, seeing himself outnumbered, hurled another volley of curses at Farfarello but acquiesced, and let himself be led out of the bar, surrounded by 15 people. The remaining people – members of the mob Farfarello was apparently surrounding himself with, Schuldig realized now – went help those who had been trampled during the rushed exit of the dancers. 

 

“Isn’t that a bit risky?” Schuldig asked as Farfarello stalked toward him. “Sinking their ship isn’t going to make their brothers in Russia love you, you know?”

 

The expression on Farfarello’s face was murderous. “Dead enemies are good enemies.” He closed his eye for a moment and pressed his hand against the wound in his shoulder. “I should’ve known.”

 

Schuldig waited for a ‘But you were distracting me!’, yet it did not come. He placed the SIG-Sauer back into its holster and watched the men on the dance floor drag those who had fallen toward the exit. They were left inside the main room of the bar with two barkeepers behind the counter, who were eyeing them curiously. The two bouncers who stood outside peeked in and then went back outside. 

 

Schuldig reached out and took hold of Farfarello’s arm. “Come on, let me take a look at that wound. It’s close to your heart.”

 

“Don’t touch me,” Farfarello hissed and pulled away. He sent Schuldig a venomous glare as the telepath reached for his arm again, his lips pulled back from his teeth. He turned away and stalked toward the bar. “I need a drink.”

 

Schuldig grabbed a beer bottle from a nearby table, followed Farfarello, and, without really thinking about it, slammed it down on the back of the Irishman’s head. It shattered, sending bits of glass everywhere and spraying Schuldig’s arm and front with beer. Farfarello stumbled forward, one hand going to the back of his head. He half-turned around, eye wide, surprised – and then fell to the floor without another sound.

 

“I need one of you to help me carry him.” Schuldig dropped the remains of the beer bottle and looked at the staring barkeepers. “Well, come on!”

 

**January 19 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**0010 Hours**

 

Farfarello’s bedroom, Schuldig learned, did not look much different from his living room in so far as that all furniture – what little there was – was black. He and the barkeeper, a small, nervous man who had a hold of Farfarello’s legs and looked as though he was expecting the Irishman to return from unconsciousness and attack him any moment, carried Farfarello into the room after Schuldig had opened the door with his elbow.

 

“On the bed,” Schuldig said, and then spent a long moment looking for said bed. In the center of the room, it looked as though someone had once planned to have a small, indoor swimming pool. A good twenty inches lower than the rest of the floor, the round space was fitted with a round mattress and haphazardly strewn with blankets and pillows. 

 

Schuldig gave a small, appreciative whistle. “Never knew he had style.”

 

They placed Farfarello onto the ‘bed’, and Schuldig ushered the barkeeper back out. The man was only too glad to go, apparently not wanting to be part of whatever was going to happen. Schuldig wondered if the people working _in_ the bar were as much of a part of Farfarello’s circle as the people who visited it, then dismissed the question as irrelevant. In the small bathroom cut off from the bedroom by a floor-length curtain, he found bandages and an old pair of pliers still crusted with blood. They would have to do. 

 

He took his items back into the bedroom, where Farfarello was already returning to consciousness. Dropping them on the bed as he knelt down next to the Irishman, Schuldig placed one knee on Farfarello’s stomach to keep him from turning over and gripped the Irishman’s T-shirt where the bullet had left a small, singed hole in the fabric. As he tore it further open, Farfarello’s eye rolled open, focusing on Schuldig with some difficulty. 

 

“Get off me.”

 

He changed plans then, and straddled Farfarello’s stomach, his knees pressing Farfarello’s hands into the mattress. Although he knew that if the Irishman wanted him off, he would get him off in mere moments, Schuldig again yanked at the already torn shirt, and finally managed to bare Farfarello’s left shoulder and part of his chest. 

 

“That’s one thing that didn’t change, is it?” Schuldig picked up the pliers and studied the bloodied hole right above Farfarello’s heart. “You’re still as reckless as ever.”

 

The Irishman glared at him for a moment and sighed. Schuldig felt him relax and took that as a sign that imminent death was at bay for now, and pulled the edges of the wound apart with his other hand. The bullet had not made it all the way through Farfarello’s shoulder, seeing that there was no blood on Farfarello’s back. 

 

“You’re still as beautiful as ever.”

 

The quiet words caused Schuldig’s hand to jerk as he dug the pliers into the wound and felt around for the solidity of the bullet. He looked at Farfarello’s face, but the Irishman’s eye was closed, his brows slightly drawn together. Schuldig waited for him to open his eye and grin at him, but it did not happen. Farfarello thought he was beautiful? 

 

“That bullet got you worse than I thought.”

 

Farfarello chuckled almost soundlessly but did not respond. The only indication that he was indeed still awake were the minute twitches of his eyebrows as Schuldig searched for the bullet and found it. He gave a soft sigh as the pliers pulled it from the wound and slid his eye open to look at it as the telepath dropped it onto the floor next to the bed. 

 

“Does it make a difference?” Farfarello asked as Schuldig unrolled a length of bandage and began to wrap it around the Irishman’s shoulder.

 

Schuldig thought about it for a moment, his hands working on their own. Did it make a difference? Beauty was a concept, nothing more. A point of view that changed as quickly as the seasons did. Of course, he was flattered to a certain point that Farfarello thought him beautiful. Maybe Farfarello was even infatuated with him. It would explain some of the reactions the Irishman had shown, and that, too, was flattering in a way. But on the grander scale of things…

 

“Not really.”

 

The Irishman smiled and let his eye close again. He remained silent until Schuldig tied off the bandages and moved away from him, setting the pliers and the remaining rolls of bandage down next to the bullet. Schuldig scooted to the edge of the bed.

 

“Weyland arrives tomorrow afternoon at Tokyo International Airport.” He rubbed his fingers together, feeling Farfarello’s blood against his skin, and for some reason, it made him feel uncomfortable. “We -”

 

“I’ll be there.”

 

Schuldig looked at Farfarello, the sudden agreement to work together with them after all coming as a surprise. From his elevated vantage point, he could see Farfarello’s functioning eye fixed on the ceiling, half-closed. A line of sweat was beading on the Irishman’s brow. He knew those symptoms from five years ago – whatever it was that made Farfarello whatever he was, had kicked in and was rapidly repairing the damage to his shoulder. Schuldig reached out and touched the hair pooling beneath Farfarello’s head, and the silky strands slipped through his fingers. 

 

“We’ll give you a call when to meet us,” Schuldig said. 

 

Farfarello nodded, apparently oblivious to the fingers in his hair. “Close the door behind you.”

 

\---

 

The bar was as quiet as the proverbial grave as Schuldig made his way down the stairs toward the exit. Someone had turned out the lights to the dance floor, and the low lamps left on near the bar and the tables cast a gloomy atmosphere onto the entire establishment. He looked at the bloodstains on the floor where the dancers had fallen, where Farfarello had stood after the Russian had shot him. He walked behind the bar and grabbed the next bottle he found to his liking, and grinned at the two bouncers outside as he stepped through the door into the relatively cold night air. They stood leaned against the walls on either side of the door and gave Schuldig calm, measuring glances; from their minds, he received … acceptance? 

 

He kept his mental grip on them as he walked down the street toward the larger boulevards but received nothing more of interest. Farfarello really seemed to have found himself a cozy little family of mobsters and gangsters within the five years that had passed – which wasn’t surprising, given the fact that Schwarz’s contacts to Tokyo’s underground had led them deeper into the murky heart of the city than anyone else could ever hope. While he doubted that Farfarello actually was a part of the Yakuza, he had to be close to them, or at least respected. Schuldig wondered if it had really been very hard for Farfarello to find his place among these people. He remembered how back then, the Irishman had vanished occasionally. Never for long, a day at most, but after these hours of his absence, the newspapers and the TV reporters would be talking about gruesome murders committed against the Christian clergy of Tokyo. They had all assumed back then that Farfarello had simply needed to vent his anger and frustration against the Christian God, but Schuldig now suspected that the Irishman had done more than that. Five years were too short a time to establish oneself as such an outstanding figure in Tokyo’s underground, as Farfarello seemed to be. No, it had to have started earlier, possibly while Schwarz had still been working for Takatori. 

 

He kept mulling it over in his mind until he got out of the cab and took the elevator up to their new apartment. The distant voice of the newscaster on TV again greeted him as he stepped through the door, the bottle of Whiskey he had lifted from Farfarello’s bar in one hand. Crawford looked up from the evening newspaper spread on his lap and sent Schuldig an inquiring glance as the telepath sat down on the couch next to him. 

 

“So…how did it go?”

 

Schuldig shrugged lightly. On the TV screen, a reporter stood against the silhouette of the Tokyo Harbor, the sky aflame in orange behind the man. Stroboscope flashes of police lights and ambulances speared the orange, the sound of sirens, though muffled, made it hard to understand what the reporter was saying; but Schuldig did not need to understand what he was saying, he knew what was happening there. It seemed that Farfarello’s order to sink the Russian’s ship had already taken effect. 

 

“He’ll meet Weyland tomorrow, together with us.” He unscrewed the cap of the bottle and took a swig, shaking slightly as the burning amber liquid ran down his smoke-parched throat. “One of his men got executed -”

 

“– Eszet-style?” Crawford folded the newspaper and nodded. “I know. I saw it happen just before you left.”

 

Nagi padded into the living room, a cup of coffee in one hand. He nodded at Schuldig and sat down, legs folded under himself. 

 

“Someone broke into the sealed-off Takatori Tower shortly before midnight and raided the office floors.” Crawford went on. “Nagi intercepted a police report given from the scene. They took the place apart. We saw a few nice camera shots of Manx at the scene, swearing to find whoever had done this to the ‘venerable Mamoru Takatori’. She looked pretty pissed off.”

 

Schuldig smiled and took another swig from the bottle. “It starts.”

 

**January 20 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1545 Hours**

 

He _hated_ airports. 

 

And he had a headache.

 

Schuldig screwed his eyes shut and wished he were somewhere else, somewhere where it was quiet. He had spent most of yesterday in bed or hanging in front of the TV, following the reports on both the sunken ship in Tokyo Harbor and the break-in into the Takatori Tower. In both cases, he was delighted to find that the theories the police were coming up with were way off the mark: while the Takatori case was put down to some morbid form of grave robbery, the sunk Russian ship was – correctly – put down to an act of revenge, but as for the motives for said revenge, the guesses were more shallow in nature than concrete. 

 

That, in turn, made him wonder about Manx, or Hanae Kitada as the public knew her. Being who she was, she had to have information, and she had to know Farfarello had been in Tokyo for all those years. Then again, it was Farfarello. The man who knew how to melt in and out of shadows without a sound. 

 

The man who thought Schuldig was beautiful.

 

The man who had managed to set Schuldig’s mind into an _ad infinitum_ loop with just a few words.

 

He groaned lightly and cradled his head in his hands, trying to ignore the multitude of voices around him. Every minute, a loud and much too cheerful female voice announced incoming and departing flights. Sitting between Nagi and Crawford in the main waiting lounge of the Tokyo International Airport, Schuldig found himself subjected to a situation he normally tried to avoid: the melting pot of humanity, almost in skin to skin contact with him, and he wasn’t moving from the spot. Although he could close himself off to a certain degree from those around him, something always slipped through the cracks and attacked his mind with gleeful ferocity. He glanced through his spread fingers and stared at the young couple sitting on the other side of the waiting lounge; the woman was on a cell phone, talking loudly and shrilly, every once in a while shouting - _screaming_ – at a little girl of maybe five years who ran across the entire lounge, dragging a doll behind her. Next to the woman, her husband was talking into his own cell phone, every once in a while shouting at the woman not to make so much noise. 

 

Hell. As if there _could_ be any _less_ noise in this place. 

 

He turned to Crawford, only to find the American staring at the young couple, brows lowered, mouth a thin line. Schuldig picked up a feeling of longing from Crawford as the American kept looking at the couple, paired with a feeling of regret and a burning, melting want for revenge. Deciding this was the worst time to try to strike a conversation with him, Schuldig briefly glanced at Nagi, but the young man seemed to be half-asleep in his seat next to Schuldig. No wonder – Nagi had spent practically all of yesterday on the computer, furtively trying to hack his way into the Eszet mainframe. So far, he had not been successful, and Schuldig doubted he would be in the nearer future. Back then, when they had had access to the organization’s data banks, they had received an encrypted email with different passwords every four days.

 

There was a brief dimming of the noise around him. Schuldig looked up and saw Farfarello make his way through the glass doors of the waiting lounge, clad in a floor-length black coat, shooting daggers at everyone around him. Schuldig met him midway. 

 

“I desperately need a cigarette,” Schuldig said as soon as he was within Farfarello’s reach. “Weyland’s plane is delayed. Prepare to wait for at least an hour.”

 

Farfarello groaned, and then followed Schuldig outside the lounge. They found the ‘smoker’s lounge’, and Farfarello stopped on the way to buy a cup of coffee from a vendor who all too obviously stared at the exotic-looking Irishman. 

 

“How’s the shoulder?” Schuldig asked as soon as they were inside the designated smoker’s area.

 

“Healing.” The Irishman chose a seat in a corner of the room, from where he had a good look at the glass windows that made animals of smokers and put them on display for all the healthy people who did not smoke…well, at least that was how Schuldig saw it. Not that he cared, he lit up as soon as he sat down, and then held the smoke in his lungs until his head threatened to start to swim. 

 

“Did you hear about the break-in into the Takatori Tower?”

 

Farfarello nodded and sipped his coffee. His eye was glued to the glass windows of the smoker’s lounge, to the people passing outside of it. He kept fiddling with the silver closures of his coat, and after a while, Schuldig realized the Irishman was nervous or agitated. 

 

“What happened?”

 

“I was approached by a man this morning. Came straight into the Serpent after whipping the ground with my two bouncers outside.”

 

Schuldig heard a jingling of alarm bells go off in his mind and turned in his seat so he was facing Farfarello. 

 

“What did he want?”

 

“He introduced himself as Terry Garfield and showed me a photo of the Lazarus Stone.”

 

The telepath exhaled softly and mentally searched through the familiar thought patterns inside his mind until he found Crawford. He gave the American a nudge and told him in brief words what Farfarello had just told him, immediately picking up Crawford’s rising anxiety. The name Terry Garfield did not mean anything to him. Schuldig broadened the connection to the American and allowed Crawford to ‘see’ everything he and Farfarello were talking about.

 

“He sounded English,” Farfarello continued. “I don’t know what he used to attack Amano and Nobuo, but neither of them will be walking for the next few weeks.”

 

_Telekinesis?_ Crawford asked through the bond Schuldig had opened, but the telepath had no answer. A multitude of Gifts allowed one to wreak havoc on the human body without ever laying a finger on it. 

 

“I had a feeling he was trying to take me out the same way or at least take me down. Became a little angry as it didn’t seem to work.” Farfarello finished his coffee and crumpled the paper cup in one hand. “He said he knows I was in Schwarz. Then he asked me if I knew where the Lazarus Stone was. I said no. I told him I didn’t have anything to do with you guys anymore.”

 

_Shit. Schuldig, if they found Farfarello, it’s more than likely they saw you in that bar as well._ Crawford followed the observation with a volley of curses. Then: _Damn it. Someone might have followed Farfarello._

 

Schuldig found his own eyes going to the glass windows automatically. He abruptly cut Crawford off and cast a mental net over everyone in their nearer surroundings, trying to filter out thoughts with specific words in them. Eszet, mainframe, agents, Schwarz, Lazarus - 

 

“Well, he’s dead now, so whatever.”

 

Just as abruptly as he had cut Crawford off, Schuldig now pulled his mental net back together and stared at Farfarello. The Irishman met his gaze and shrugged lightly, turning the crumpled paper cup over in his hands. Schuldig relayed the news to Crawford, who first cursed again and then chuckled dryly. There was no doubt Terry Garfield had come from Eszet, just as there was little doubt now that more would be coming – but then, this was what they were waiting for, wasn’t it? Crawford had no intentions to stretch them thin; he planned to wait right in the middle of where the storm would hit – if it hit – and take them out from there. Schuldig gave Crawford the location of where he and Farfarello were and then cut the American off again.

 

“I didn’t like this man.” The Irishman rose and dropped the crumbled paper cup into a wastebasket, and then remained standing, his eye fixed outside of their glassy box. “He knew too much. He asked me things about Ireland. About Takatori. Then he said they’d managed to kill Crawford already, and that they currently were tracking down everyone who’d tried to make a getaway after the Elders died, and that it would only be a matter of time until they’d have them all, and that if I valued my life, I shouldn’t try to leave Tokyo in the nearer future.”

 

Schuldig snorted and shook his head. It was Eszet’s old ‘intimidate, lie, and ask questions’ method. Whoever Terry Garfield had been, the man had not been very bright to approach one such as Farfarello with this method. Although Schwarz had never sent Farfarello to Rosenkreuz, they had known about him; the reports Crawford had sent about Farfarello in the beginning had been true and detailed – after all, there had not been much to tell. Insane, delusional, and highly dangerous. 

 

Overall, Garfield had been an idiot, prancing into the Seventh Serpent like that. 

 

Which cast a not very favorable light on Schuldig’s state of mind, but at least Schuldig could claim having worked together with Farfarello for years.

 

And Farfarello thought he was beautiful. Maybe that counted for something. 

 

_Yeah,_ Schuldig thought, following the hair down Farfarello’s back with his eyes, _at least I’ll make a beautiful corpse one day._

 

\---

 

Thomas Weyland was a short, stocky man in his late fifties. He had balding, grayish-brown hair and light gray eyes under thick bushy eyebrows, and a face that was so unremarkable it was remarkable in its own way. Schuldig entered his mind while he shook Weyland’s hand and learned that he was a pyrokinetic as well as the former ‘dean’ of Rosenkreuz. He had been married, once. Widowed now, his wife had died in a car accident ten years ago, and his two sons had long since gone their own ways. Weyland heard from them, occasionally, and the man was smarting that neither of them really wanted anything to do with him and ‘that fucking organization he worked for’. 

 

Weyland traveled alone and light. He was nervous, which was understandable considering Eszet thought him to be the source of their current ailments, but he managed to keep the nervousness under control. He was a chain smoker. 

 

He had spent the last 35 hours on different planes, and told them he had nearly been caught at an airport in Rio de Janeiro; leaving behind a charred mess, Weyland had hastily made new arrangements to take a flight that would bring him to Tokyo an hour later than planned, and he apologized three times because he had made them wait. 

 

He was Brad Crawford’s uncle.

 

\---

 

“Never knew you had an uncle,” Schuldig commented lightly as Crawford strolled into the living room of their apartment. Thomas Weyland was sound asleep three doors down the corridor in the room Crawford originally had reserved for Farfarello. “You never thought of him.”

 

“I don’t see him as my uncle.” Crawford sat down on the couch and let his head sink back with a sigh. “I was in Rosenkreuz thanks to him. He thought it would be a good place for someone with my powers to be. I can count the times I personally spoke to him while I was there on one hand.”

 

“And now he’s gone turncoat? Interesting.”

 

Crawford shot Schuldig an annoyed look and rubbed both hands over his face. Schuldig wisely withheld the fact that he had been listening in on the rather emotional reunion of nephew and uncle in the room where Weyland was now sleeping; Crawford had been his usual reserved self, but Weyland had nearly been in tears. Much of what was said had raised Schuldig’s eyebrows above their usual level, but he kept the knowledge to himself for now. 

 

“What did he say to the fact that the Lazarus Stone is in our possession?” Nagi asked from the window, where he had been quietly talking to Farfarello, who sat on the windowsill. 

 

“I didn’t tell him yet.” Crawford motioned to Schuldig for a cigarette. “We’ll let him sleep, and then discuss everything else.”

 

“Tell me, Oracle,” Farfarello cut in, “You say you’re planning to get rid of all of them. Who do ‘all of them’ include?”

 

Schuldig could feel the tension in the living room rise like fog crawling up a riverbank. Farfarello and Crawford had not spoken a single word, neither at the airport nor on the drive back to their apartment. He asked himself for how long Farfarello planned to give Crawford the cold shoulder… considering Farfarello’s God complex had lasted for more than 14 years, though, Schuldig could see this going on until the day they died. That, and Crawford was just as unforgiving. 

 

“All of them, Farfarello,” Crawford said in measured tones, “means just that. All of them. Or rather, as many as I can get a hold of.”

 

“Including Weyland?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Good-bye to the good old ‘family over anything’ tradition,” Nagi muttered next to Farfarello. “How did you get in contact with him?”

 

“He gave me a phone call after my wife and daughter were killed.” The American exhaled smoke through his nose and sniffed. “He tried to warn me, but he was too late. He has some moles in the new-formed leader ranks who gave him the tip.”

 

Farfarello’s eye narrowed. “How did he know where to find you?”

 

“I’d stayed in contact with him. Damn it, Farfarello, this isn’t a cross-examination. Trust me a little, will you? By the time I was married, Weyland and the others were already opposing the new group of leaders that was forming.”

 

Schuldig snorted before Farfarello could, and earned himself a sharp glare from both men. Although he could not get rid of a slight uneasiness at Crawford’s recollection about his relationship with an uncle who, by all rights, should be hated for throwing Crawford into the wheels of Rosenkreuz and subsequently Eszet, he found himself enjoying the tenseness between Crawford and Farfarello to a point where he thought it was amusing. On the car ride back from the airport, he had dug deep enough into Weyland’s mind to know the man truly meant to destroy Eszet as much as Crawford intended. For that alone, Schuldig was willing to deal with the man – for a while at least. 

 

“So what now?” Nagi asked after a moment of silence had passed.

 

“Now we wait for him to wake up.” Crawford stood and walked to the door. “Get some rest while you can.”

 

Schuldig watched Nagi try to strike another conversation with Farfarello, but the Irishman gloomily stared out of the window at the street below and answered in monosyllables. He put his feet up on the coffee table and crossed his arms behind his head after Nagi finally had given up and left as well, the young man’s thoughts revolving mostly around lining Farfarello and Crawford up against a wall and methodically kicking both their butts for a while. 

 

“Why so gloomy?” Schuldig lit a cigarette and crumpled the empty pack. “I mean, I can understand you’re being pissed off at Crawford, but that’s no reason to be a pest to Nagi. You should be happy he’s talking to you at all, considering it was you who killed his teenage sweetheart back then.”

 

“I don’t like this situation,” Farfarello said sharply. “Crawford is suddenly telling us things he’d been keeping from us for years; don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

 

“No, why? I can tell you, Crawford holds no great love for his uncle, and guilt eats Weyland from within. If you’re smelling betrayal, then you smell wrong.”

 

“I don't smell betrayal.” The Irishman adjusted his position on the windowsill and scratched at his left shoulder. “Weyland is no telepath, you tell me. So how do we know those moles of his he’s so sure of are telling _him_ the truth? I’ve never been to Eszet, but you all kept telling me enough for years. What if they’ve been feeding him lies and he’s selling them to us? You wouldn’t know them for lies if he thinks they’re the truth.”

 

Schuldig had to admit that Farfarello did have a point there. “You think this is all a set-up?”

 

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

 

Schuldig sighed and let his head sink back to watch his smoke trail toward the ceiling. “If this is a set-up, we’d be dead already.”

 

“So what about this Terry Garfield this morning?”

 

“Farfarello, would you fucking relax?” He gave the Irishman a half-amused, half-annoyed glance. “Look, I can understand why you’re twitchy about this all. But…give a little here, okay? What counts is that we have the Lazarus Stone, and that Eszet are coming here. We managed to kick their asses once. Show a little faith?”

 

Farfarello snorted. “Five years ago, Eszet didn’t know it was us who were backstabbing them. Now it’s different. They tried to kill Crawford and got his wife and daughter instead. Fine. Do you really think Eszet are going to believe he ran into the wild? Crawford? As soon as they figure out where Weyland is, they’ll know where Crawford is. Face it, Schu, Crawford is as megalomaniac as they are if he thinks he can go against them.”

 

Those words again. Schuldig became annoyed by Farfarello’s repeated disbelief in their combined abilities – after all, five years ago, they had managed to work against Eszet while working for them _and_ Takatori at the same time, hadn’t they? Although it was refreshing to have a normal conversation with the Irishman, Schuldig wished Farfarello wouldn’t be quite so acidly in his observations. Where had the fun-loving Farfarello gone? The man who now sat on the windowsill in their living room seemed like the universal outlet of reason and doubt, not the breathtaking bundle of chaotic ideas and sometimes hair-rising adventures he had once been. 

 

“This is madness,” Farfarello muttered, looking at the street below. “Crawford can -”

 

“Would you _shut up_?” Schuldig rose from the couch and walked to the window. “You’re driving me crazy with your ‘Crawford this’ and ‘Crawford that’. One could get the impression that you spent the last five years doing nothing but thinking about Crawford!”

 

He received another murderous glare, much like the one he had received when he had tried to take Farfarello’s arm in the bar. Only that this time, there was no beer bottle in sight, and Farfarello was facing him. The Irishman seemed on the verge of firing another comment, but then refrained from it, contenting himself with staring out of the window again. 

 

Farfarello was _moping_. A six-foot-two-inch black-clad killer with white hair, a golden eye, and a habit to slice others in half if they annoyed him - sat on a windowsill and was _moping_ because no one seemed to heed his words. Schuldig gave a sigh of exasperation and clenched his hands. Nagi’s mental image of lining Farfarello and Crawford up against a wall and kicking their butts came back to him. It was so tempting. 

 

The Irishman turned his head and gave Schuldig a raised eyebrow. “Why are you staring at -?”

 

He pressed his mouth against Farfarello’s and kissed him because it seemed to be the only thing that would shut the Irishman up, and simply walking out wasn’t an option. Walking away from a lifestyle was one thing. Walking away from a moping Irishman was something else entirely.

 

\---

 

The first thing Schuldig noticed were Farfarello’s muscles tensing to a point where the Irishman’s frame felt like a board of iron where their bodies were touching. And Farfarello’s teeth were very, very sharp. 

 

Then he had a truly ridiculous thought: _Farfarello is going to bite my tongue off._

 

Then he thought about the meaning behind this all, this…this thing that had started out as a rather stupid way to try and make Farfarello stop talking. Usually, one had a number of reasons to kiss someone, and Schuldig had to admit to himself that he had picked a rather trite reason. Infatuated? Hardly. Interested? Maybe. Perhaps it was the lack of meaning behind the kiss that made it so easy for Schuldig to tilt his head and suck on Farfarello’s lower lip to try to coax the Irishman into responding to him. 

 

Well, at least Farfarello was quiet now.

 

He wound his hands into the hair on either side of Farfarello’s head and tugged on it as Farfarello remained stationary, disliking the sensation of kissing someone who didn’t reciprocate. Schuldig was not stupid. He did not need to be able to read Farfarello’s thoughts to know that there was more behind the ‘I think you’re beautiful’ sentiments the Irishman apparently had been harboring for him for a long time now. 

 

He broke the kiss and tugged more harshly on the hair. Farfarello was staring at him, lips parted, his breath stirring the hair on Schuldig’s brow. He seemed more surprised than shocked.

 

“Do you want this, or not?” Schuldig asked, his voice down to a near hiss. He leaned forward again and bit at Farfarello’s lips, hard enough to draw blood. 

 

The slideshow of emotions across Farfarello’s features was fascinating to behold, as the Irishman seemed to go from doubtful to angry to…something Schuldig could not classify. His hands came up to wind around Schuldig’s wrist; aggressively, Farfarello yanked Schuldig’s hands from his hair.

 

“Yes.”

 

There was no gentleness between them; Schuldig doubted Farfarello knew the meaning behind the word, and he himself seemed to have unlearned it within the last few minutes. Without care for the open living room door or the fact that Crawford, Nagi and Weyland might hear their moans, they tumbled to the ground in front of the window in a tangle of limbs and hair. As Farfarello yanked on Schuldig’s belt, the telepath closed his eyes and did not open them again until he hunched over the Irishman, his cock slick with spit, and slid into him, gritting his teeth against the pain and the pleasure that mingled together into a heady mix. Saliva did not make for a substantial lubricant, neither did the blood he felt flowing between them; what did it matter, the Irishman felt no pain, and Schuldig only needed a few heated thrusts until he came, poised above the prone body beneath his, his back arched to the point of threatening to snap, his knees stinging from rug burn, orgasm wringing a strangled, keening sound from his throat. 

 

For a single minute, the world was blessedly dim around him. There were no whispers, no thoughts, only the thunder of his heart and the rushing of the blood in his ears; Schuldig clung to the illusion of mental deafness with his eyes closed again until the world started to seep back in, and with it the sounds of Farfarello’s breathing. He pulled his hips back, sharply, and sat back on his heels to pull Farfarello’s lower body into his lap, ignoring the stings of pain from his knees and his cock. His hand found Farfarello’s cock, his other arm wrapped around Farfarello’s thigh; it did not take long until he felt Farfarello’s seed run over his fingers, intently listening to the other man’s sounds as he rubbed the liquid into the skin of Farfarello’s cock, delighting in the shudders this earned him. 

 

Then it was over, and Schuldig felt the well-known sensation of embarrassment creeping up upon him, the want to just get up and leave. Farfarello’s head was turned to the side, away from him. Whatever fragile balance had previously existed between them, right now it was non-existent, maybe even shattered. He did not really care. 

 

He looked up bleakly as Crawford strode into the living room and ignored the feelings of simple misgiving he received from the American. He felt weightless and boneless as Crawford pulled him to his feet, and leaned against the wall, looking on with little interest as the American then attempted the same with Farfarello, only to receive a growl as the Irishman rolled onto his side and to his knees from there on. Pulling his pants back up was almost an afterthought. There were a few spatters of blood on the virginally clean carpet. Farfarello’s hair was a tangled mess. 

 

Schuldig felt post-orgasmic tiredness take him. He pushed away from the wall and grabbed Farfarello’s arm as he passed him, uttering a wordless sound of anger as the Irishman yanked away from him. They stood and stared at each other, and Crawford might as well have been a wall ornament. 

 

“I’m going to bed,” Schuldig said. “Are you coming, or not?”

 

“He just did,” Crawford said dryly and bent to pick Schuldig’s shirt up from the floor. 

 

Schuldig again reached for Farfarello’s arm, and this time, the Irishman went with him as he pulled. Schuldig kicked his shoes off as soon as they stepped into his bedroom and dropped his pants again, stepping out of them on his way to the bed. There was a brief moment of awkwardness as Farfarello joined him beneath the covers; they were not lovers, they had to think about where to fit their limbs until they finally felt comfortable, but as soon as they did, Schuldig sighed with relief and pressed his chest against Farfarello’s back. Farfarello was really too tall to be held this way, spooned against Schuldig. The Irishman’s skin was cool to the touch and slightly sweaty. 

 

Schuldig waited for Farfarello to say something, ask something, and fell asleep while he was waiting.

 

**January 21 st, 2002, Tokyo**

**0426 Hours**

 

He woke up to the fading reality of his earliest childhood memory: the face of his father, leaning over him when he had woken from a bad dream, telling him to go back to sleep and that dreams could not hurt because they were not real. He had been four years old; the then still complicated patterns in which adults thought too tangled for him to comprehend. However, his father’s thoughts had been warm and kind and a little amused and little Tim Reitz had gone back to sleep after his father had left again.

 

23 years later, Tim Reitz was just another memory, and Schuldig knew dreams could kill if one was not careful. He kept his eyes closed for the time being and concentrated, extending his mental awareness beyond the walls of his bedroom, and encountered Crawford and Weyland’s minds. They were talking about Crawford’s wife and daughter. It was nothing he wanted to listen to. Nagi’s mind was filled with irregular images of a great crowd of people and tall, gray buildings shooting up into the sky like daggers. The young man was asleep. 

 

Finally, he did open his eyes to the semi-darkness of the bedroom, blinking. Through the Venetian blinds of his window, the streetlights cast a regular striped pattern across Schuldig and parts of the floor. The bed in front of him was empty. 

 

The sound of the shower running in the adjoining bathroom told him where Farfarello had gone. Schuldig rolled onto his back and sat up, wincing as the cloth of the blanket rubbed against the overly sensitive skin of his cock. He leaned against the headboard of the bed and reached for a pack of cigarettes from the drawer of his nightstand, and then sat in the striped darkness and smoked. 

 

A block of light lit half the room as the door to the bathroom opened. Farfarello stepped out, a towel wound around his hips, and closed the door again. The Irishman stopped a few feet away from the bed when he saw Schuldig sitting there, then dropped the towel and reached for his leather pants, which lay discarded at the foot of the bed.

 

“And now we’re never going to talk together again, and each time we see each other we’ll both feel uncomfortable and avoid looking at each other,” Schuldig said dryly. 

 

Farfarello buttoned his pants and shrugged. “No, why?”

 

“Please don’t give me the ‘I don’t care what you do to me as long as you do something to me’ crap, Far. It doesn’t work.”

 

The Irishman picked his shirt up from the floor and looked at it; despite the poor lighting, Schuldig could see a tear down the front. “I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

 

He stubbed his cigarette out. “Don’t make me spell it out for you.”

 

“Spell what out for me?” Farfarello dropped the shirt back onto the floor and gathered his wet hair into one hand to pull it over a shoulder and forward. “I’m missing your point here, Schu.”

 

“Apparently. This doesn’t change anything between us.” He made a gesture at the bed.

 

Farfarello sighed and stopped combing his fingers through his hair. He stepped into his boots and walked to the window, looking out at the street below. Schuldig felt both vaguely disappointed and slightly stupid for what he had said, not because he did not mean it but because Farfarello was not reacting in the way Schuldig had thought he would. The Irishman’s unpredictability could be unnerving at times; this was such a time. He reached for another cigarette and nearly missed the quiet words that came.

 

“I’m not in love with you. I don’t think any of us really _can_ love. I think you’re beautiful, and yeah, it was a nice fuck. I’m not expecting anything of you. None of us owe one another anything.” Farfarello turned from the window and walked to the door. “And besides… _you_ grabbed _me_. Not the other way around.”

 

He did have a point there.

 

\---

 

“…with that stone here, Eszet will be hard on your heels, believe me.”

 

Schuldig caught the tail end of the conversation as he walked into the kitchen, where Crawford, Nagi, Weyland and Farfarello sat around the table, the Lazarus Stone on the table before them. He ignored Crawford’s raised eyebrow and Nagi’s barely concealed grin and nodded at Weyland’s good morning wishes, retrieving a cup from the cupboard for coffee. His stomach was growling, but as far as he knew, there was not anything substantial in the fridge or the cabinets; he would go out later for breakfast. Good morning indeed. The old-fashioned clock above the door showed a quarter past five in the morning. He scratched a hand through his still wet hair and sat down between Farfarello and Nagi, sipping his coffee. 

 

“I was just telling your teammates about the Lazarus Stone,” Weyland said. “A remarkable artifact indeed. I’ve never seen it from this close before.”

 

“Yeah, great.” Schuldig glanced at Farfarello, whose gaze was fixed on the stone. 

 

The brief conversation in his bedroom had put Schuldig in a rather bad mood; for one, he was, in a way, angry with himself for having been so way off the mark as far as Farfarello’s intentions were concerned, and then, he felt his feathers had been ruffled unjustly. Schuldig was not used to be brushed off so easily, no matter what his actions had been. It gave him the wholly dissatisfying feeling of having done something wrong in the sense of having missed his cue somewhere. Or the point. 

 

And there had been no point. 

 

Maybe that was the point.

 

“…uh…as I was saying,” Weyland said, looking back and forth between Schuldig and Farfarello as though he could not determine which he found more interesting, “It’s good you got a hold of the stone, although now you’ll have Eszet on your heels.”

 

“Let them come,” Farfarello said nonchalantly. 

 

“Oh, they will come,” Weyland said. “The entire organization is on the move, it seems. They’re pulling their teams back from all over the world, not counting the ones who have fixed positions, as you four had when you worked for Takatori, but even those have gotten word to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.”

 

Schuldig leaned back and put his knee up against the edge of the table. “Who are the new Elders?”

 

“Good you’re bringing that up, young man.” Weyland leaned down and picked a manila folder up from the floor, from which he took four photos. He slid them up next to the Lazarus Stone. “Here they are. Mark Downs, his son Jonathan Downs, and Jonathan’s wife Claudia Lamont.”

 

“Cozy little family,” Nagi remarked.

 

The photo of Mark Downs showed a man close to Weyland’s age. He had severe features and salt-and-pepper hair in a crew cut, and there was no warmth in his gray eyes. To Schuldig, the man was a startlingly accurate twin of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance, the eerie character in “The Shining” [3], only twenty years older. His son, Jonathan, had a similar facial structure, but it was softer and a little rounder; Jonathan Downs had black hair and the same gray eyes as his father. Claudia Lamont seemed almost unremarkable next to the men, her long blond hair and flat green eyes giving her a superfluous beauty that pleased the eye but did not stick with memory. 

 

“Jonathan Downs is a Singer,” Weyland explained, his finger on the photograph of the man. “It’s not known what all he can sing, but so far, we know he’s done it to stone and metal, as well as components of the two.”

 

Nagi’s head rose a fraction. Schuldig could see a dark fire begin to glow in the blue depths of his eyes. ‘Singers’, of whatever form, were close to telekinetics. Whereas a telekinetic moved objects or persons from without, Singers moved them from within with their voices – able to call upon the tiniest shifting in metal, wood, stone, and even water, they were able to direct molecular forces to a degree where Schuldig had heard tales of Singers who had moved the proverbial mountain. Or parted water to lead a nation through an ocean. Singing was an often overlooked, rare gift. 

 

“His son, Mark,” Weyland touched the next photo, “is a pyrokinetic, like me.” He lifted his hand and concentrated briefly. On the tip of his index finger, a miniature flame appeared, dancing unsteadily before it flickered out again. 

 

“I bet you never look for a lighter, mh?” Schuldig asked lazily.

 

Weyland chuckled. “I actually have to concentrate to make such a tiny flame as I just did. Fire is a primal force of this planet, as are water, wind and electricity. I will not bore you with the details of how it works, or how it’s assumed to work, but trust me…I can much more easily lay fire to an entire city than light a cigarette. Primal forces want out; they don’t want to be contained.”

 

“I heard pyrokinetics were responsible for the last outbreak of the Aetna, is that true?” Nagi asked.

 

Weyland shrugged lightly. “Who knows? If we were, then those who did it surely died within their own flames. That’s how most pyrokinetics die. They misjudge the extend of their own powers.” He looked at his hands, and Schuldig picked up one of Weyland’s deepest fears. Fire. As much of a contradiction as it was, it was also understandable. Schuldig’s deepest fear was not death. It was loosing himself in himself, the caving of the fragile walls around his ego. His mind started wandering sometimes…and sometimes, he was afraid it would simply walk out on him one day.

 

Weyland cleared his throat, and indicated Claudia Lamont’s photograph. “She is a biokinetic.”

 

“What’s that?” Farfarello asked.

 

“Well,” Weyland’s eyes shifted to Crawford, who nodded silently. “She’s like you, only in reverse. And, I would guess, a little more effective as far as the usage of her powers is concerned.”

 

Silence fell. Schuldig glanced to the side and felt uncomfortable as he saw the stony expression on Farfarello’s face. Across the table, Crawford tensed, and Nagi simply stared back and forth between Weyland and Farfarello with surprise written all over his face.

 

Surprise, yeah, that was a good way to put it in Schuldig’s opinion. Now that Weyland had said it, many things suddenly did make a lot more sense. Biokinetics were able to call upon the chemicals and the machinations of the human body; they were puppeteers who could direct the heart to beat faster, the blood to flow faster, and the lungs to quit working simply by taking over the biorhythm of someone else’s body. The negative copy of those powers meant direct control over one’s own body functions, which would explain Farfarello’s fast healing as well as his complete disregard of pain. It did not explain how Farfarello was practically invisible to any other psychic power, but it was a good start. He wondered if the Irishman knew about his Gift and if he was able to control it.

 

Farfarello stared at Weyland for a moment longer and then relaxed again. “I see.” He glanced to the side and briefly met Schuldig’s gaze before he froze back into his silent position, his gaze fixed on the Lazarus Stone.

 

“What I don’t understand is why Eszet wants to move here,” Nagi said after he had given Farfarello another curious stare. “They’ve been in Europe for so long, why the sudden relocation?”

 

“It’s a political decision, mostly,” Crawford said. “Europe is many countries all perched on one continent. Russia has long since ceased to be an influential factor in world politics and economics since the Cold War was officially over, and the same goes for the smaller countries like Italy, Greece, Poland, and so on. The iron fist of reason rules Germany, there’s little space for ‘magic’. The rest of the countries in Europe simply aren’t very influential as compared to, say, America or Asia. Other than Germany maybe, they stick to themselves and have no great interest in someone else’s business. And Germany as a powerful country is out of the question since the Second World War. Any moves Eszet might make with the German politicians would immediately be interpreted as a second attempt at world domination. They’re too closely watched.”

 

“Also,” Weyland cut in, “You mustn’t forget the spiritual potency of Asia. Gods and Goddesses still hold reign here, maybe not as much as they once did, but here a politician is more likely to believe in Telepathy and Telekinesis.”

 

“So why don’t they go for America?” Schuldig asked and stretched. The discussion was beginning to bore him. He had little interest in the political workings of Eszet; it was enough for him to know that they were coming to Japan, enough for him to know that they as Schwarz – and were they Schwarz again? – would go against them once more. 

 

“Too large,” Weyland said. “And too religious. There would be witch-hunts all over again if Gifted were to try to influence the people there. It might work here and there, but on a grander scale, I doubt it. Also, there is -”

 

“Who is Terry Garfield?” Farfarello suddenly asked. 

 

Weyland blanched. “Goodness. He’s here?” 

 

“Was,” Schuldig said with a wide smirk. 

 

“What do you mean, ‘was’?”

 

“I killed him.” Farfarello said matter-of-factly. “Yesterday morning. He pranced into my bar and tried to threaten me.” 

 

Weyland shot Crawford a disbelieving glance and received a nod in confirmation. He laughed, a dry, almost choked sound, then exhaled deeply and said, “Shit.”

 

**January 21 st, 2002, Tokyo**

**0653 Hours**

 

“Man, I’m freezing my ass of!” Nagi complained, rubbing his arms against the swaths of frozen moisture greeting them as soon as Farfarello swung the double doors to the large freezer open.

 

The five of them stood in an empty house a little further down the road from the Seventh Serpent. It was an ordinary brick house with a flat roof, and nothing on the outside would let one assume that its inside was a little less than ordinary. The ground floor was one large room with a linoleum-covered floor, which squeaked under the soles of their boots, making Schuldig think of hospitals. Against the far wall, three large freezers, each as tall as a grown man, took up most of the space. Farfarello stepped into the one in the middle. Schuldig could only guess at the reasons the Irishman had had to preserve the corpse of Terry Garfield, and he was not so sure he really wanted an answer.

 

“I can’t believe he’s dead,” Weyland muttered at Schuldig’s side.

 

Terry Garfield, according to Weyland, had been the new Elders’ prime hunter. They had sent Garfield out for assassinations that required silence and skill; he had been a globetrotter who never stayed long in one place, traveling from one killing to the next. His latest job, Weyland had told them, had apparently been the order to hunt down the Gifted who had taken the original Elders’ demise as a chance to try to get away from Eszet. As to what Garfield’s Gifts had been, Weyland’s information had been more than sketchy. Following Farfarello’s description of what Garfield had done to the two bouncers, both Crawford and Schuldig had been guessing telekinesis. However, Weyland had spoken of telepathy as well.

 

Curious as to why Weyland was so adamant about seeing the corpse of Terry Garfield, Schuldig dipped into the pyrokinetic’s mind. There was the usual assortment of emotions to sort through before he arrived at the information he wanted – nervousness at the alien surroundings, nervousness at the white-haired Irishman and, surprisingly, nervousness at seeing the corpse, which did not make sense to Schuldig. Garfield was dead. What was there to be nervous at?

 

He dug deeper and touched something in Weyland’s mind that closely resembled the ‘ball of pain’ he had touched in Crawford the day the American had met him in Venice. There it was again – guilt. Weyland felt so much guilt, it was eating at him from the inside, slowly devouring the fabric of his very being. Schuldig raised an eyebrow as he learned that Garfield had been responsible for the death of Crawford’s wife and daughter; Weyland had known this, but apparently, he had underestimated the other man. Almost as if he stood next to him, Schuldig relived Weyland’s hectic telephone call to his nephew, felt the anguish Weyland had felt as he relayed the news about a killer being out to get Crawford and his family, felt the sudden, breathtaking rush of guilt, pain and more guilt that came days later, as Weyland learned – also on the phone – that his own call had come too late.

 

What was the man trying to achieve? Look at the corpse of Terry Garfield and find some sort of illusionary peace with himself after seeing that the man responsible for the death of his nephew’s wife and daughter was truly and irrevocably dead? Schuldig inwardly sighed and withdrew from Weyland’s mind. The faces of guilt were ever changing, and so were the faces of the reasons conjured up to put guilt to rest.

 

He was just about to light a cigarette as Farfarello walked back out of the freezer, dragging Garfield’s wrapped corpse behind him. The plastic plane around the frozen body crinkled and crackled loudly as the Irishman dropped the feet by which he had drug the corpse; Farfarello turned and closed the freezer doors again before he knelt down next to the corpse and began to unwrap it methodically.

 

“You were merciful,” Crawford commented as the plastic plane was thrown to the side.

 

“I was angry,” Farfarello retorted.

 

‘Angry’, in relation to Farfarello, meant there had been no playing, no hunting, no teasing; the corpse of Terry Garfield was, except for the blue tinge to the skin and the odd look of the frozen hair, whole. Schuldig walked to the other side of the corpse and looked down at it. The glazed, marble eyes were half-open, the lashes frosted. Over Garfield’s heart, the stiff material of the suit the man was wearing was stiff with frozen blood. From the frayed edges of the hole in the suit, Schuldig knew Farfarello had stabbed him to the heart and then wrenched the blade around in the wound, turning the wildly beating organ into mush. The frozen red crystals were melting in the warm, stuffy air of the house, and Schuldig could already smell the first whiffs of metal in the air.

 

“So he is really dead…” Weyland stepped to the head of the corpse and looked down on it. “Really dead…”

 

Schuldig frowned and looked up at the face of the man. He was hearing chaotic, racing thoughts from Weyland, fearing for a moment the sight of the corpse had put Weyland’s mind into overdrive. Behind Weyland, Crawford took a step forward, one hand reaching out to drag his uncle back away from the corpse by the arm.

 

Both Schuldig and Farfarello scrambled backwards as Weyland lifted a foot and stomped down on the face of Terry Garfield, the sound of shattering cartilage and bone swallowed by the howl that erupted from Weyland’s mouth. The telepath, still caught in the overwhelming whirlwind Weyland’s mind had suddenly become, didn’t stop moving until he hit the wall, staring open-mouthed as the pyrokinetic again and again stomped down on the corpse, screaming wordlessly, nothing but a long, drawn-out animalistic howl.

 

… _those who did it surely died within their own flames. That’s how most pyrokinetics die. They misjudge the extend of their own powers…_

 

The heat wave did not really come as a surprise.

 

“Fuck!” Schuldig yelled and scrambled away from the wall to make a dash for the door, seeing Farfarello do the same out of the corner of his eyes. “He’s gonna burn us all!”

 

He barreled into Crawford, who stood slack-jawed, eyes wide, staring at his uncle. Schuldig grabbed the American’s arm and tried to drag him toward the door, looking around for Nagi. The air inside the house suddenly seemed charged with energy – destructive energy, heating up so quickly Schuldig could feel it trying to press down his throat like a wet, hot fist. He took a deep gulping breath and decided to let Crawford fend for himself; saving his own hide seemed so much more crucial right now. And that howling…he had to get away from that howling.

 

Crawford’s hands clamped around his shoulders and prevented him from escaping. Schuldig whirled around and shoved at the American, feeling his eyeballs become dry all of a sudden as another heat wave broke free from Weyland, robbing him of breath. He had trouble focusing, blinking rapidly, tears beginning to stream down his face. Schuldig imagined them sizzling and drying up on his cheeks.

 

As suddenly as the heat had come, it vanished. The howling died as abruptly, as if someone had cut Weyland’s throat. Schuldig took deep breaths and looked around for Farfarello, finding him standing behind Nagi, the Irishman’s hands clamped down on Nagi’s shoulders as the young man held both hands out in front of him to direct his Gift and surround Weyland with a telekinetic shield. Nagi’s face was drawn into an expression of strain.

 

Thomas Weyland was a living torch only seconds later as his own fire consumed him. Schuldig took the scene in with a feeling of detachment as Weyland’s dying thoughts began to filter into his mind; to anyone else, the sight of a human being wrapped into a solid block of fire would be gruesomely fascinating, but to Schuldig, the fascination value of that sight went down under the onslaught of memories, thoughts and feelings that poured into his mind. There was no way he could shield himself against this.

 

Dimly, he heard himself begin to scream in synch with Weyland. There was so much to see that it threatened to overwhelm him, and his bone-deep fear of sinking under another person’s ego came back to him. Weyland’s life was flashing before Schuldig’s eyes in a rapid succession of images complete with the feelings that accompanied them – from the earliest childhood memories to the latest impressions and experiences.

 

All of them fake.

 

In the few seconds before the fire consumed Weyland, Schuldig glimpsed the wasteland the man’s mind really was. Barren and devoid of life, but filled with memories that were insubstantial and tailored to make others believe they were true, this wasteland taunted Schuldig and told him what an idiot he had been. And in the middle of that wasteland, he saw the black, disfigured and bloated heart of the lie Thomas Weyland had lived.

 

He felt Crawford shake him by the arms and felt a muscle in his neck give a warning pang of pain as his head lolled around on his neck. He gritted his teeth and used the body contact as an anchor to pull himself free of the maelstrom that threatened to take him down to nothingness, just as Weyland was not quickly dwindling down to nothingness.

 

Then hands cupped his head on both sides and the thoughts died. It happened so quickly it left his stomach reeling, almost as if he were seasick. He gasped, reaching up to wrap his hands around the wrists of those hands and stared at Farfarello as the Irishman’s fingers tightened where they were digging into Schuldig’s cheeks.

 

For the first time in Schuldig’s life, his mind was completely silent.

 

And it was terrible.

 

He wrenched Farfarello’s hands from his head and turned away from the Irishman just in time to see Nagi release the telekinetic cocoon with which he had surrounded Weyland. What was left of the man fell to the ground with a sound much like sand being poured onto metal and shattered into dry, gray flakes that immediately rose into the air and danced under the lamps that lit the room. Gradually, he heard thoughts – other thoughts, not his own – filter back into his mind. Nagi, confused, shocked, exhilarated. Crawford, his mind almost blank from shock. The thoughts of two men walking down the street outside, squabbling over a business contract. Beyond that, the endless sea of humanity that spoke to him in whispers and sighs. Schuldig felt his stomach calm down and took a deep breath before he turned away from the ash on the ground and the dancing flakes.

 

Nagi was staring at Farfarello, hugging himself. Farfarello was looking at the ash, frowning. Crawford, seemingly, pulled himself back together and motioned for Nagi to leave the house, an order the young man followed without another word. From Nagi’s mind, Schuldig picked up a feeling of violation.

 

“We’re leaving,” Crawford announced, making a sharp motion with his chin toward the door.

 

“You do that,” Farfarello said tonelessly. He moved forward, past Schuldig, and stopped just short of the crumbled ash.

 

“You’re coming with us!” The American’s voice took on a note of sharpness as he stepped forward, anger beginning to set his face into a frozen mask.

 

Schuldig, more or less nothing more but a spectator at this point, could only watch in fascination as Farfarello whirled around and lifted his right hand, the palm facing Crawford. Crawford stopped as if he had walked right into an invisible wall, his movement jerky and seemingly uncontrolled – or rather, not controlled by himself. The American turned around on his heel and moved toward the door, where Nagi was looking in, anxious. Crawford was cursing, loudly, but to no avail – he moved, and Farfarello was pulling his strings. When the man was out of the door, Farfarello turned his head and looked at Schuldig out of the corner of his eye.

 

“Leave.”

 

The telepath stared back at Farfarello, rooted to the spot where he stood. There were a million things he wanted to ask. How long had Farfarello known about his Gift? How had he silenced Schuldig’s mind? How…

 

“Why did you never tell us?” he asked instead, slowly shaking his head.

 

Farfarello kept staring at him. “Would it have made a difference?”

 

“No, but -”

 

“So why do you care?”

 

“You fucking _lied_ to us for years, you bastard!” Schuldig exploded, blowing all caution to the wind. He was feeling a number of warring emotions, and all of them demanded answers and someone he could let his anger out on. “That was a fine show you gave when Weyland told you what you are!”

 

“Schuldig…”

 

“You ass! For how long have you been playing this game?”

 

“…get…”

 

“You and your fucking grudge against Crawford and us!”

 

“…out…”

 

“And your fucking crusade against God? Was that a game too? God damn you, Farfarello! You’re a fine one to talk about us just _using_ you! Looking at this, I’d say you _let_ us use you!”

 

“…of…”

 

“You never trusted us all along! You never needed us!”

 

“…my…”

 

“I’m amazed you didn’t kill me or Crawford yet, you son of a bitch!”

 

“…life…”

 

“You -”

 

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE!” Farfarello screamed on top of his lungs.

 

They stood and stared at each other for what seemed to Schuldig like minutes, but were only seconds. He felt…betrayed, for lack of better wording. Things were rapidly falling into place like the pieces of a puzzle sliding together, directed by an invisible hand. Farfarello, once upon a time, had made sense to the telepath in a way that Schuldig thought he had been able to understand his motives. They had made sense to him for years. They had been making sense _hours_ ago.

 

The picture he had made himself of Farfarello over the years was rapidly falling apart and replaced with something Schuldig was not sure he wanted to know. He hated it when things surprised him, and this certainly was more than a surprise. It was a slap in the face. It implied so much about the Irishman that Schuldig did not know about what he was supposed to think first.

 

Had Farfarello ever truly been insane? Or had it all been a show, put on to divert them from thinking too much about him?

 

And why was he even caring about it? Farfarello had been right in what he had said; none of them owed the other anything. Schuldig felt himself calming down from his outburst and took a slow, deep breath.

 

“Get out of here,” Farfarello said again, softer this time. His gaze was fixed on the ash and the partially burned corpse of Terry Garfield. The smell of cooked meat began to infiltrate the air.

 

“I’ll do just that,” Schuldig said, and walked out of the house.

 

\---

 

“He was conditioned, wasn’t he?”

 

Schuldig looked up at the question and thoughtfully regarded Nagi, who stood in the door to the living room, leaned against the doorjamb.

 

“Yeah.”

 

Nagi sighed and walked into the room. He sat down on the other end of the couch and grabbed a pillow, hugging it to his chest.

 

“And Farfarello knew all along what he was.”

 

Schuldig nodded. “Yeah.”

 

“Why didn’t you notice Weyland’s conditioning?”

 

The telepath lit a cigarette and propped his feet up on the coffee table, taking a long drag. They had returned to their apartment three hours ago. Crawford had gone into his room and slammed the door without a word. Schuldig did not need to read the Oracle’s mind to know the pain and the anger he was feeling. On the drive back to the apartment, Schuldig had carefully taken a look and learned that Crawford had seen his uncle kill himself only seconds before it happened. There had been anger, confusion and pain, but anger was the prominent emotion, burning as hotly as Weyland’s fires had burned.

 

“The conditioning was too complete,” he answered Nagi’s question.

 

“I don’t understand it. Explain it to me.”

 

They both looked at the door of the living room as the sound of a loud crash echoed through the apartment. Schuldig winced but refrained from checking what Crawford was throwing against the walls of his room; it sounded like he had just leveled his laptop. The hollow, splintering sound that followed sounded like a chair. He nodded at Nagi as the young man gave the door of the living room a telekinetic shove and closed it. It did not entirely shut out the sounds of destruction coming from Crawford’s room, but they were not as loud anymore as they had been.

 

“They must’ve gotten a hold of him either shortly before he went to meet us, or some time before that. I think they completely frisked his memory, took it from him, and then put it back into his mind, only that this time they wove something into it. It was so skillfully done that only a very deep search would have revealed it. I checked him, several times, but nothing seemed out of place.”

 

“Like a computer virus,” Nagi said slowly. “Intercept the original data, put something into it, and set it back on its predestined way.”

 

“Yeah.” Schuldig had to smirk at the explanation, but it was the best he had ever heard. “They conditioned him to self-destruct at a certain point. I don’t know if seeing us put things into motion, or if seeing Terry Garfield did it, or if it was timed.”

 

Nagi shook his head and rested his chin on the pillow. “To think that only a few hours ago, we were sitting around the kitchen table with him…”

 

Schuldig nodded. Nagi’s words were what he had been thinking about ever since they had returned to the apartment. In retrospect, he realized how lucky they had been. He doubted that if Weyland had ignited in the kitchen, any of them would have had the sense to try to stop him.

 

“I think he tried to warn us,” Schuldig said slowly. “When he stomped on Garfield’s face – I think that was when the conditioning kicked in. He must have realized what was going to happen and tried to warn us.”

 

“Despite the conditioning?”

 

“Nothing is impossible.” Schuldig leaned his head back. “You’d be amazed at what people are capable of doing when they realize they’re going to die.”

 

Nagi rubbed his hands over his face. “That means they knew he was going to meet us. Goodness…”

 

“Kill two birds with one stone, Nagi. Crawford said Weyland had been opposing the new Elders. Why waste the perfect opportunity to get rid of him and us?”

 

The Japanese drew a face. “Farfarello, he…he did something to me.” He hugged the pillow tighter to his chest. “He touched me and suddenly I was moving as if I was hanging from strings.”

 

Schuldig thought about how Crawford had moved when Farfarello had forced him to leave the house. Jerky, wooden, like a puppet directed by a puppeteer. Now that he had calmed down, his blind anger was gone, and he found he could think about what had happened without wanting to rip Farfarello’s face off.

 

“Apparently, he _can_ use his Gift for more than just repairing his wounds.”

 

“We never really knew anything about Farfarello, didn’t we?” Nagi asked. “I mean, look at it. He’s not insane anymore. I almost doubt he ever was. Then, his Gift. He knew about that all along, didn’t he?”

 

“Maybe. I still can’t read his mind, Nagi. But I know one thing – I don't trust him anymore. Whether or not he ever really was insane or just put on a show, he kept too many things from us. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

 

“Maybe you should talk to him.” Nagi sat up as Schuldig raised an eyebrow at him. “No, really. I mean, it’s none of my business, but you two were always awfully close, and going by yesterday’s -”

 

“Yesterday was nothing,” Schuldig interrupted.

 

“You two were making an awful lot of noise for nothing.”

 

“We fucked. Okay? I’m not you and he isn’t Tot.” Schuldig said coldly. He took perverse pleasure in the expression of old hurt that crossed Nagi’s face at the mention of that name – the name of the girl Farfarello had killed five years ago, perhaps robbing Nagi of the only true love the boy back then had ever experienced. “You know what he told me? He said it’d taken him half a year to get the drugs out of his body. And you know what? I don't believe him anymore. I should’ve noticed it when he said it. He always healed so quickly, so why did it take him half a year to get rid of the drug addiction, if it ever was an addiction?”

 

Nagi chewed on his lower lip and cringed as another loud crash echoed through the door. The young man looked at Schuldig and again shook his head, and Schuldig knew he wanted to say something else.

 

“He probably saved our lives in there, you know?”

 

Schuldig’s voice hardened. “Don’t try to sell me the story of the monster with the heart of gold, Nagi.”

 

“I think you’re just pissy because he surprised you.”

 

“ _What_ did you say?”

 

“You heard me.” Nagi sounded annoyed. “It was all over your face when he popped up in the Takatori Tower, and I think it’s the same now. You’re angry because he surprised you, and you’re not used to being surprised. And what’s all that talk about trust? Give me a break, Schu – did we ever really trust each other? Don’t tell me you ever really cared if Farfarello trusted you or not. Yeah, I’m angry too. I feel violated. I feel used. He made me do something I didn’t want to do. He made me stay in there when I wanted to run away. I have one of the strongest and most dangerous Gifts on this planet, and Far simply took control over me and made me do something I didn’t want to do. Crawford’s pissed off because Far isn’t heeling anymore, but eh, Crawford is pissed off at everything that doesn’t go the way he wants it to.”

 

Schuldig opened his mouth to protest, but Nagi held up a hand. “I’m not done yet. I don’t care what’s between Farfarello and you. I don’t care if you fuck each other’s brains out or kill each other. But I know one thing – if it really comes down to it, I’d choose to stay with Farfarello until this is over, and I don’t give a flying fuck if he lied to us all those years. I don’t trust him, but at least he gets the job done instead of sitting here moaning while Eszet is obviously closing in on us. You weren’t able to notice Weyland’s conditioning, Crawford didn’t warn us in time, and come to think of it, we’re all here because Crawford thinks he needs to piss on Eszet’s tree. I’m still asking myself why I’m here, and I’m afraid that if I really think about it, I’m here because Crawford asked me and I reacted to it because I was used to it five years ago, and not because I really care about you or Crawford or Farfarello.”

 

“You’re surprising me, Nagi,” Schuldig said in a low growl. “And you’re right, I don’t like surprises.”

 

“Deal with it.” The young man rose from the couch and flung the pillow down. “With Weyland gone, we’re back where we started. I can’t hack into the Eszet mainframe without being noticed. Anyway, right now I doubt _anything_ Weyland told us held so much as a grain of truth. So what do we do now, huh? Sit here and hold our dicks and wait for them to come here, if they aren’t already here?”

 

Schuldig rose as well, angrily stubbing his cigarette out. Nagi had been right – he hated surprises, and Nagi had just surprised him. On top of that the surprise Farfarello had heaped on him – it did not make for a very good mood. He did not care to examine his own emotions too closely now and contended himself with knowing that he was angry, angrier than he had been in years.

 

He stepped out from behind the table as Nagi walked to the door. “Where do you think you’re going?”

 

Nagi turned, one hand on the door handle. “I’m leaving.”

 

“You’re going to Farfarello.”

 

“Yeah.” Nagi’s voice sounded like a challenge. “I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, Schu. You know where to find me. And do something about Crawford. It sounds as though he’s taking the entire room apart.”

 

The door opened, closed, and Schuldig stood in the living room and felt like an idiot.

 

**January 21 st, 2002, Tokyo**

**1223 Hours**

 

He was packing. What few belongings he had brought with him from Venice fit easily into the suitcase lying on his bed. The two SIG-Sauer guns lay on his pillow.

 

An hour after their conversation in the living room, Nagi had left the apartment, suitcase in hand, laptop case slung over his shoulder. Schuldig had not talked to him and sat brooding in the kitchen, at the very table Weyland had sat with them only hours ago. Smoking cigarette after cigarette until his lungs were screaming at him to stop and even numerous drinks did not soothe the parched feeling of his throat, Schuldig had then finally gathered the resolve to face Crawford on a rampage.

 

Crawford’s room had been in a state of destruction that resembled Ground Zero of a detonation. Bookshelves, the table, even the bed toppled over, folders, clothes and bed sheets strewn over the floor. Crawford himself, sweaty, stringy hair hanging into his eyes, had sat on the floor amid the wreckage, methodically cleaning his gun. The unholy fires in the Oracle’s eyes had made Schuldig hold back any sarcastic comments he wanted to make at the sight of the state the room had been in.

 

The American had not appeared as though he was listening when Schuldig told him about Nagi’s intentions of joining Farfarello, and the telepath had felt wholly uncomfortable as Crawford simply kept snapping the magazine of his gun in and out as if he had developed a tick over the last few hours. Although Schuldig involuntarily got the tail end of Crawford’s thoughts, he had refrained from going deeper, having no interest in getting a barrage of jumbled emotions and burning anger dumped on him.

 

“Go pack,” Crawford had told him in clipped words. “We’re going to change location. Weyland was here. We need to be careful.”

 

When he really thought about it, Schuldig had half a mind simply to leave his things where they were and walk out of the door straight to Tokyo International Airport, where he would buy a ticket and disappear into the concrete jungles of another metropolis on another continent.

 

The other half of his mind was determined to stay here and finish things as quickly as possible. Perhaps he had been deluding himself in assuming there was ever really a way away from it all. Once you set your foot on the road, there was no going back. He could change direction, he could change names, looks, pasts, but he could not change himself. He had concluded that the life he had been leading after Schwarz’s demise had been an illusion without aim. As soon as Eszet was destroyed, he thought as he closed the suitcase, at least he could then resume his aimless wandering without having to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life. Weyland’s enforced suicide had very clearly shown him that Eszet did have means of getting close to them without really getting in touch with them.

 

Who would be the next killer? The waitress in the café, bringing him a coffee and a beignet? The woman he picked up in a bar? The man he took to bed?

 

Whatever happened to him, he knew he had had it coming. He had destroyed so many others. It seemed only fair that life tried to pay him back for what he had done over the years, either on orders or out of boredom. Other people started collecting beer caps when they were bored. Schuldig had started twisting emotions, fuelled by the desire to see in others what had been done to him.

 

“And here I am…trying to justify me to myself.” He sat down on the bed and slipped the shoulder holster on, adjusting the weight of the guns against his ribs.

 

Crawford appeared in the doorway, holding a suitcase of his own. He had taken a shower and did not look as disheveled as when Schuldig had talked to him before, but the telepath could literally feel the aggression rolling off Crawford in steady waves.

 

They left the apartment and hurried to Crawford’s rental car. As they put their suitcases into the trunk, Schuldig asked, “Where are we going now?”

 

“To the bar.”

 

“You’re kidding me.” Farfarello was the last person on earth Schuldig wanted to see right now.

 

Crawford slammed the lid of the trunk shut and shot him a challenging glare. Schuldig sighed heavily and threw his hands up in a gesture of acquiescence. They got into the car and Crawford pulled out into the traffic, driving a little more aggressively than necessary.

 

“Weyland gave me information about Eszet’s arrival dates,” Crawford said as they stopped at a red light. “Nagi has to check them over. I’m not sure I can take anything Weyland told me for granted.”

 

_Well there’s a surprise_ , Schuldig thought. “How do you think he can do that? He tried before, but there’s no way of going in without being noticed. Unless…” He glanced at the man next to him, eyebrows raised. “Unless you plan on making yourself blatantly noticed.”

 

The light changed, and the car moved forward with a jerk. Crawford did not respond to Schuldig’s theory and simply drove, staring straight ahead at the cars in front of him on their way to Ginza.

 

“Great,” Schuldig said and sighed. “Give them the address of Far’s place while you’re at it.”

 

Crawford did not respond to this, either.

 

\---

 

Nagi opened the door for them as they arrived at the Seventh Serpent. The young man looked as though he had been expecting them, but he did not comment and simply stepped back to let them in, closing the door and locking it again as soon as Crawford and Schuldig were inside.

 

“Farfarello’s not here,” Nagi said. “He had something to do.”

 

Crawford lifted his suitcase onto the counter of the bar and turned, his eyes sliding over the interior of the bar and the dance floor. Schuldig sat his own suitcase down on the floor next to the counter and leaned against it, glad he did not have to deal with the Irishman right now.

 

“Nagi, hack into the Eszet mainframe.” Crawford turned to face the Japanese and Schuldig. “I don’t care how you get in. Just get in there and get as much information as you can. About the new Elders, about the Lazarus Stone, travel dates, locations of other groups, supported Japanese businesspeople and politicians.”

 

Nagi raised both eyebrows and briefly looked at Schuldig, who shrugged. “But…that’s like rolling a red carpet out for them.”

 

“I know. Just do it.”

 

The young man gave Crawford another look and then walked up into the loft, leaving the door open behind him. Through his eyes, Schuldig could see Nagi's makeshift quarter in the large first room. He dug a little deeper and found the memories of Nagi arriving at the Seventh Serpent. Farfarello had let him in without a word, just as if Nagi had greeted them, and then had left shortly after. He ‘watched’ Nagi set up his laptop and hotwire a telephone outlet for a dial-up Internet connection and left him alone, having no interest in the how-to process of hacking. Instead, Schuldig took a seat at the bar and regarded Crawford, who had not moved, staring at a spot on the floor.

 

“You’re in a self-destructive mood, Crawford,” Schuldig said conversationally. “And Farfarello won’t be happy to find us here, too.”

 

Crawford shrugged. “He’ll survive it.”

 

A mirthless laugh escaped the telepath. “I’m not worried about _him_ surviving it, you know?”

 

“What are you so afraid of all of a sudden? You can fuck him but not stand the idea of having to spend a few days under the same roof with him?” Crawford’s voice turned vicious. “Funny, a few years ago, you and Far were practically glued together.”

 

That again. Schuldig wondered if being married had severely screwed with Crawford’s idea of having sex with someone just for the hell of it. The thought gave him pause. As far as Schuldig knew, Crawford had not had a single bed partner during their time in Schwarz. Back then, Schuldig had thought of him as mostly asexual.

 

“You know…you can just about go fuck yourself, Crawford. I’m sure you remember how that works.” Schuldig slipped off the stool and stretched, glancing at the other man to see if his insult had caused a reaction other than a stoic glare. Seeing none, he shrugged and walked to the stairs.

 

“I’ve been thinking,” Crawford said as Schuldig had made it as far as the open door at the end of the stairs. “Do you think you could pretend for a few days you actually like him? You know, screw him a little, or rather, again, and make him do what we want him to do? Someone with your expertise surely won’t have any problems achieving that, no?”

 

The telepath stopped and stared at Crawford, keeping the rising anger off his face. The barb had hit home for more reasons than he cared to think about, and Crawford knew that. Schuldig pursed his mouth and inwardly chuckled at himself. It seemed that he could admit to himself what kind of bastard he was, but hearing it from others still twisted something inside him, even after all those years of hearing it.

 

“Just a thought,” Crawford added as the silence began to lengthen. He was smiling, but it was the parody of a smile, something Schuldig was more used – _had_ been more used – to seeing on Farfarello’s face. Kissing insanity, flirting with madness.

 

Nagi glanced at him over the screen of his laptop as Schuldig crossed the floor to the door leading into Farfarello’s bedroom, his face bathed in the unreal blue light of the computer world. It was clear to see that the young man had overheard their ‘conversation’. Schuldig picked up a distinct train of thought that went in the direction of ‘He’s right, you know?’, but he did not care to have another discussion with Nagi right now. In fact, he did not feel like talking to anyone now.

 

Only hours ago, he had kissed Farfarello because the man had been moping and getting on his case by doing it.

 

Ironically, Schuldig now felt like moping himself.

 

In Farfarello’s bedroom, Schuldig kicked off his shoes and strolled to the window, lifting the heavy drapes to look out at the sea of roofs that stretched endlessly before him. A fire ladder ended shortly beneath the window, giving him an idea of why the Irishman had chosen this room as his bedroom. He looked to the side and tried to make out which house it was Farfarello had lead them into this morning.

 

From outside of the bedroom, the dim sound of a conversation between Crawford and Nagi began to filter through the door. Too faint for him to understand and most likely dealing with Nagi’s attempted hack into the Eszet database, Schuldig did not bother with listening in. He let go of the drapes again and shrugged his jacket off to fold it and put it onto the windowsill. Then he rolled up in the middle of Farfarello’s ‘bed’, and decided to take a nap. There was nothing else to do until Nagi came up with something from his computer work.

 

\---

 

He woke to the sound of metal sliding over metal and cracked an eye open, surprised at the darkness around him. His nap must have turned into deep sleep, going by the stretch of night sky he saw over Farfarello’s shoulder as the Irishman climbed through the window and turned to shut it again and draw the drapes. He remained motionless and watched Farfarello walk out of his line of sight, and then rolled onto his back to see where the Irishman had gone. The sound of running water from the bathroom mingled with the smell of freshly spilt blood that suddenly hung in the air of the bedroom. An injury?

 

Schuldig got to his knees and shook his hair back, remaining in his sitting position to clear his head and shake off the cobwebs of sleep before he rose and carefully found his way through the room to the bathroom curtain. Farfarello stood before the sink, a torn, bloodied shirt in a heap by his feet. There was a long gash down the back of his right shoulder, deep and reaching nearly to the waistband of his pants. Strands of his hair clung to the blood that covered almost his entire back, the white hair now slowly taking on the color of red. He met Schuldig’s eyes in the mirror above the sink before he returned to the task; Schuldig felt revulsion rise in his throat as Farfarello stoically dug a bullet out of his chest with a small knife and plunked it into the sink. He stepped closer and saw four other bullets already lying on the black porcelain, and from this up close, the smell of blood was nearly overwhelming.

 

He searched for something to say but found nothing, so he remained quiet and watched. When Farfarello dragged his hair forward over his left shoulder, Schuldig narrowed his eyes, barely suppressing a sound of surprise. It seemed that while he was watching, the edges of the gash on Farfarello’s back began to move toward one another. He looked up as Farfarello gripped the edges of the sink and heard him breathe faster, but his eyes wandered back to the wound that seemed to heal within seconds, leaving bloodied but unblemished skin. Fascinated, he reached out and traced the skin where only moments before a deep wound had been. It felt smooth and hot to his touch, as if the Irishman had been lying in the sun for a long time. He looked over Farfarello’s shoulder into the mirror and saw the bullet wounds on his chest vanish in a similar manner. Farfarello’s eye was closed in concentration or fatigue.

 

“That’s why you always ran around with bandages but we never saw any scars on your body when they came off,” Schuldig said quietly. “That’s why you don’t have any scars on your arms and hands and chest _now_.”

 

The Irishman nodded and held his hands under the water. Schuldig watched the water run red and studied the scars on Farfarello’s face.

 

“Why not those as well?” He pointed.

 

Farfarello met Schuldig’s eyes in the mirror again. “I want them there.”

 

“Your eye?”

 

“I can’t make something out of nothing. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. It’s gone.” He shut the water off and stepped away from the sink, his shoulder bumping into Schuldig’s chest, the congealing blood leaving a smear on Schuldig’s shirt.

 

Schuldig reached out as Farfarello began to move away and took hold of his hips. For the first time since he had learned to use his Gift to its fullest extend, Schuldig was treading on unknown ground. Once one could rely on simply reading someone’s mood from their thoughts, knowing about facial expressions became a moot point; Schuldig _had_ learned interpreting Farfarello’s expressions, but now found himself asking if that hadn’t become a moot point, too. As little as he liked the idea, Farfarello might just be that one being out of a million who could lie straight to Schuldig’s face, and the telepath would never know about it unless he actively _caught_ him lying. It was a fascinating concept as well as an annoying one. What good was a mind reader if there were no thoughts to read?

 

“Why?” The moment he asked it, he remembered his thoughts about Manx’s question, and amusement came quickly. He was not above asking the most common of all questions, it seemed. Perhaps he was human sometimes, after all.

 

“Why not?” Farfarello remained stationary, his head tipped forward so far that Schuldig knew he was looking at the hands on his hips.

 

“I’m not buying that, Far. You have to do better than that.”

 

A long, drawn-out sigh followed. “I don’t like being an open book. When you got me out of the asylum, I’d been listening to people tell me what I am for years.”

 

“Then why the charade? Your crusade against God?”

 

Schuldig could feel the chuckle that followed his questions reverberate through the shoulders pressed against his chest. Farfarello might not have lied when he told Schuldig he did not love him, but there _was_ something between them, perhaps something neither of them could grasp. He moved a bit closer to the Irishman still, pressing his front flush against Farfarello’s back, mindless of the blood that began to stick his shirt to his skin.

 

“When you’re a child you believe what you’re told. I loved God, so much that I was afraid of him. I was afraid I’d loose him. I did. So I hated him.”

 

Farfarello did not move away from the contact, but he remained tense. Schuldig wondered if whatever was between them was some sort of recognition on an unconscious base. Predator and predator, with mutual respect and attraction between them. Danger could be as powerful an attraction as desire, if not more so, and Schuldig knew that it was partly the danger that emanated from Farfarello that made him interesting to him.

 

“Do you still hate him?”

 

“He ceased to matter to me. My entire life revolved around him, and while I was in Schwarz, I didn’t have to think about anything else. That changed after we fell apart.” The Irishman lifted his head and placed his hands on Schuldig’s, gently but resolutely pulling them from his hips. “The way I see it, the only way to ultimately kill him would be to kill or let myself be killed so I can stand face to face with him. I’m not going to do him that favor.”

 

He let go of Schuldig’s hands and turned around. “And maybe I’ve already dealt him the killing blow simply by not devoting my entire life to him anymore. Gods and Goddesses cease to exist when no one believes in them. They’re like ideas no one wants to listen to anymore.”

 

Only hours ago, Schuldig would have taken great pleasure in taking Farfarello apart. Changes in mood seemed to happen quickly between them; what had happened earlier now seemed years in the past, part of someone else’s life. He wondered if it felt the same to Farfarello. The endlessly stretching number of days that had been waiting for him during his travels had been wiped away by the near-certainty of death waiting for him only days, maybe only hours away. He had encountered that sentiment often, in people on the verge of death, had seen it in the eyes of those he had killed himself – regret, for not having lived while there was still life to be lived.

 

“Answer me one more question. I cannot read your mind. Why not?”

 

“I don’t know. I know I can ‘speak’ to you, but I don’t know why you can’t read my thoughts.” Farfarello shrugged lightly. “It’s not something I ever spent a great deal of time worrying about.”

 

Schuldig nodded. It was just as well. In the end, it did not seem to matter. He remained where he was as Farfarello again turned around and stepped toward the shower, loosening his belt and pulling it from the loops. He had the distinct feeling that something had been left unfinished, left unsaid, and the even more pressing feeling that it would remain an open end if neither of them said it now.

 

He kicked the shirt out of the way as he followed Farfarello across the bathroom and hooked his fingers into the waistband of Farfarello’s pants, giving a light tug. His other hand wound around the long strands of Farfarello’s hair. It was enough to make the Irishman turn around, giving Schuldig the opportunity to slip his arm over Farfarello’s shoulder and the fingers of his other hand to the front of Farfarello’s pants, his knuckles resting against the other man’s muscled abdomen, slippery from their journey across blood-slicked skin.

 

“I don’t love you,” Schuldig said slowly, intently watching Farfarello’s face. “But I want you. That will have to be enough.”

 

He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to Farfarello’s, in much the same manner he had done before. This time, he did not have to tug on Farfarello’s hair to evoke a reaction; he felt arms tighten around his middle a moment later, fingers locking in the small of his back, their bodies leaning into each other. Farfarello made a rumbling sound in the back of his throat as Schuldig let his entire weight sink against him, and struggled to keep them both standing, but in the end, Schuldig won out, and they landed on the bathroom floor in a tangle of limbs. Schuldig was able to overlook the discomfort of the cold, tiled floor in favor of the body pressing him against the tiles. Farfarello disentangled himself and knelt above Schuldig on his hands and knees, their mouths still fused, the Irishman’s hair creating a cocoon around their heads, shutting the light out.

 

There was a moment of insecurity and tenseness as Schuldig reached up and pulled the eye patch off, but it vanished quickly. He traced the pattern of scars that marred the closed eyelids of Farfarello’s left eye and wondered what had happened to it. It was weird to touch the place where normally, the orb of an eyeball would be cradled beneath the smooth skin, but that feeling passed quickly, too, under the onslaught of sensations as Farfarello slid his mouth down Schuldig’s chin onto his throat and sucked a dapple of blood to the surface of the skin directly above Schuldig’s Adam’s apple. Buttons popped and hit the tiles with miniature ‘ping’ sounds as Schuldig’s shirt surrendered to four hands. He lifted his legs and crossed his ankles behind Farfarello’s back as Farfarello crouched above him and explored Schuldig’s chest with lips, tongue and fingers, letting himself be carried by the warm fires that began to burn in his loins and extended into up into his fingertips and down into his toes.

 

It was enough. It had to be, because Schuldig knew he could give no more of himself to someone else, no matter who they were. He was afraid he would not get it back when it was over.

 

He slid his hands down between their bodies, knowing he was grinning like an idiot from the sheer pleasure alone as teeth closed on one of his nipples and carefully worried the pebbled flesh; he welcomed the tiny, bright spear of pain as those teeth nearly sought blood. His fingers worked of their own accord and freed his erection, which strained against the fly of his pants, so intense it hurt. He listened to his own throaty moan as Farfarello lowered himself fully onto him and trapped his cock between their stomachs, and from somewhere, far off, Schuldig thought he could hear Crawford chuckle and see Nagi grin, but this was somewhere else, and he was _here_ , where all things were slick, hot, and smelled of blood and musk and clean sweat.

 

Farfarello slid up his body like a snake and roughly bit into Schuldig’s lower lip. “Bed. Now.”

 

How could he refuse?

 

The Irishman cursed under his breath as Schuldig tightened his legs around Farfarello’s waist and slung his arms around Farfarello’s neck, leaving it entirely to him to master the brief journey from the bathroom to the bed. Schuldig spent a short moment asking himself if it was wise to let Farfarello strain himself so after having been injured multiple times, but then decided that the Irishman was indeed a grown man and capable of voicing concern. If he really thought about it, he did not care, anyway. As long as Farfarello moved, he was alive and the danger of death held at bay by whatever the Irishman was or could do.

 

Retribution came quickly as Farfarello simply dropped himself forward as soon as they reached the bed, giving Schuldig a scare and pushing the air from Schuldig’s lungs as his weight came down on him. An elbow digging sharply into his side, Schuldig coughed and strained to regain his breath as Farfarello yanked on his pants, carelessly scattering Schuldig’s shoes and socks, the pants following quickly and landing in a graceless heap in a corner somewhere. Schuldig rolled onto his elbow and shrugged the shirt off one shoulder, and then stopped in mid-move as he was about to repeat the same movement with the other sleeve. Farfarello sat between his spread legs, crouched like a cat seconds from the jump to end the life of something small, soft, and furry.

 

What little light poured into the room from the curtain that parted the bathroom from the bedroom and around the drapes in front of the window reflected off the shiny surface of the small knife that had appeared in Farfarello’s hand. The same knife he had used to dig the bullets from his chest. Schuldig remained motionless, frozen, as Farfarello’s arm extended, the knife lowering to Schuldig’s abdomen and descending from there on. He closed his eyes.

 

Twice, his heart jumped. Twice, pain, clear and bright and piercing like extreme cold, bit into his skin, once at the base of his cock, and at the juncture of his right thigh and hip the second time. He slumped back against the mattress, forgetting about the shirt, and loosened his fingers from where they had cramped into the bed sheet. His back arched up from the bed as Farfarello’s mouth covered the cut in the juncture of his leg, the sudden change from what seemed to have been the kiss of an ice shard to the heat of Farfarello’s tongue as much of a shock to his system as the cuts themselves had been.

 

Schuldig had never been a great friend of pain, no matter what circumstance. But here, now, it fit. The little warning whisper in his mind remained – any man or woman giving themselves over to someone who sat between their spread legs with a blade in one hand would hear that whisper – but Schuldig felt all caution and care drift away like a whiff of cloud in a strong breeze as Farfarello’s tongue spun a web of saliva from Schuldig’s thigh through his pubic hair to the base of his cock, and he felt reason shatter to a million pieces as he was taken into molten, liquid heat.

 

His hands stroked down his own chest until they found the tangles of hair resting against his stomach, teasing his skin with every move of Farfarello’s head. He wound his fingers into it and slowly moved his hips, his breath starting to come in harsh gasps. Those stilled as a fingertip began to circle his anus before pressing against the small ring of muscle, sliding in to the first knuckle and then just _staying_ there as Farfarello inhaled noisily and sealed his mouth around the base of Schuldig’s cock and the head of Schuldig’s cock bumped against the back of Farfarello’s throat and Farfarello swallowed around it and Schuldig thought he was going to just die now from the heat and the pressure and then warm and _bright_ and warm and _tight_ and his muscles strained to the point of cramping as he moved his hips as far up as they would go and orgasm was a punch to the stomach, an avalanche of heat that left him cold, and he didn’t give a damn if Crawford and Nagi heard his strained sounds that began to ascend to a crescendo until he felt as though there was no air left in his lungs and the bed seemed to swallow him…

 

…and he fell back down to earth, hard, with a loud gasp, and then lay there twitching uncontrollably until Farfarello stopped swallowing and pulled away from Schuldig’s cock and rested his cheek against Schuldig’s chest.

 

It took him a few minutes to regain his breath and for the room to stop spinning in circles around him. “Where the fuck did you learn that?”

 

Farfarello chuckled and slowly pulled his hand away from Schuldig’s ass, gripping Schuldig’s hipbone instead. “A lot can happen in five years, Schu.”

 

It was as good an answer as any, and Schuldig did not trust his brain enough to process any other kind of information right now, anyway. He basked in the afterglow of sex and paid attention to the minute twitches and tingles that ran all over his body as results of his orgasm, wondering in what language his nerves were singing right now. Although he had felt his own hair rest against his naked shoulders often enough, the feeling of Farfarello’s even longer hair dragging over his stomach and chest was completely new and alien and felt like the feet of a thousand ants marching across his skin. In the heat of their bodies, the congealed blood began to melt again, emitting a not unpleasant but simply uncommon smell. Schuldig knew he had smelled worse in his life.

 

He was pleasantly surprised this time. A few hours ago, he would have bet his life that at the next available opportunity, he and Farfarello would have cracked each other’s skulls open. The urge to smack Farfarello was as strong as the urge to kiss him, and if Schuldig had a choice, things were confined to kissing from now on – for his own sake as well. Although they had never openly fought against each other, he had the distinct feeling that he would not fare well in hand to hand combat against the Irishman, and using his Gift would not get him anywhere. Of course, there was still another way, but that way used too much of his own resources, and he was loath to use it and had labeled it as a last resort years ago. Ki blasts were a magnificent way of blasting away an opponent as well as blasting one’s own strength to hell.

 

In addition, Schuldig was a practical man. There had been a grain of truth in Crawford’s teasing question if Schuldig could not make Farfarello do what they wanted the Irishman to do. He was a killer, and he was good at what he did. Although Schuldig doubted seducing Farfarello would work, maybe giving him something he obviously wanted would. The way he felt right now, all mangled and happily glowing in the aftermath of sex, not only Farfarello would be getting his end of the bargain, if it was one. Schuldig dragged his hand up from where it rested against the Irishman’s sweaty, bloody back and buried his fingers in the hair at the back of Farfarello’s head. He received a barely audible purr in response and lifted his head to find that single eye closed and Farfarello’s features relaxed in the grip of sleep.

 

He sighed and laid his head back down, grimacing at the ceiling. Farfarello lay half on him, and he was not exactly a lightweight. However, Schuldig’s concern of being squashed flat vanished under the steady if unsynchronized beating of their hearts that lulled him to sleep before he was aware of it.

 

He did not dream. And if he did, then he did not remember the dreams.

 

**January 22 nd, 2002, Tokyo**

**0352 Hours**

 

Coffee.

 

There was no smell like the smell of coffee: black, oily, tickling the senses awake from even the deepest sleep, lest one was already wading through Jordan’s waters. Schuldig cracked an eye open and saw the fuzzy silhouette of Crawford standing at the edge of the bed, looking down at him. The telepath, right now, could not care less that he was naked, and rolled onto his side, only then realizing that he was alone in bed. Farfarello was nowhere in sight. Slightly irritated that he had not heard Crawford enter the bedroom, Schuldig located the source of the heavenly smell and reached out for the cup Crawford carried.

 

Crawford hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “He’s in the shower.”

 

“Give me the cup and die,” Schuldig grunted, feeling every muscle in his body protest the movement as he sat up. “What time is it?”

 

Crawford crouched down and held the cup out to Schuldig, who took it with both hands and inhaled the clouds of steam that rose from it. Despite the pain in his muscles – especially his stomach muscles, he noted – he felt refreshed and rested, if a bit worse for the wear. He cocked his head to the side and listened to the sound of running water from the bathroom, noting that he needed a shower, too. One look at his chest and stomach revealed that dried blood was caking on his skin and coming off in tiny flakes.

 

“Nearly four.” The American pressed his hand against the mattress as if he wanted to test it, the near grin hanging in the corner of his mouth grating on Schuldig’s nerves.

 

Schuldig was in the mood for anything but Crawford’s antics now, as amusing as they could be at times. He was both dreading and anticipating the moment when Farfarello would step out of the bathroom; in Schuldig’s experience, there were two kinds of after-sex meetings: the ashamed or ‘so-what-now?’ kind, and the ‘get up while the other person is still asleep and leave’ kind, both of which he was well-acquainted with.

 

Well, the way he saw it, he would be acquainted with the third kind in a few minutes. The ‘I want to kiss him and then kill him, but only if he survives it so I can kiss him again’ kind would certainly be a new experience.

 

“Kinky.”

 

“Huh?”

 

Crawford pointed. Schuldig looked down and saw the small, now crusted cut in the juncture of his thigh and hip, one of the two places where Farfarello had used the small knife on him hours ago. Irritated even more now, Schuldig grabbed for a blanket and covered himself before he glared at the American.

 

“If all you’re capable of is making stupid comments, go annoy Nagi.”

 

“Eh, Nagi would blast me through the next wall if I annoyed him now. He’s been at his computer ever since you and Far hit the sheets together, and he’s down to cursing and hammering on his keyboard.” Crawford rose and sniffed. “He did find a few things, but we still don’t know how or when the Elders are going to come here. Until we do, I guess there isn’t a lot to do.”

 

“That’s no reason to annoy me.”

 

“You’re one to speak of annoying others, Schu.” Crawford rolled his eyes and walked to the door. “Enjoy your coffee.”

 

“Enjoy your coffee,” Schuldig mimicked as soon as the door closed, then looked up as the bathroom curtain was swept aside a second later.

 

Farfarello stepped into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around his hips. “What did he want?”

 

“Brought me coffee and annoyed me.”

 

“Aha.” The eye patch was back in place. Farfarello, holding the towel with one hand and brushing the other hand through his wet hair, stopped at the edge of the bed. “Any progress with Nagi’s hacking?”

 

Schuldig wondered how Farfarello knew about that, seeing that the Irishman could not have talked to either Nagi or Crawford unless he had done so before he made an entrance through his bedroom window. He shook his head and sipped his coffee, regarding Farfarello over the rim of the cup. Simply watching drops of water roll from Farfarello’s hair down his chest made Schuldig want a shower – or lick those drops off. His hedonistic urges seemed uninhibited by looming doom, and Schuldig did not know if he should rejoice in that knowledge or repeatedly slam his head against the next available wall.

 

_What we want most is always what we can’t get_ , his thoughts came back to him. _And now that I’ve had what I wanted, I can’t seem to get enough of it._

 

Never mind that what he had wanted were Farfarello’s thoughts, not Farfarello’s body. He would happily settle for the latter. He leisurely finished his coffee and watched Farfarello stalk through the bedroom, picking clothes from a closet.

 

“I have something I need to take care of,” Farfarello said over his shoulder as he slipped into his pants. “As long as Nagi’s not making progress, I might as well look after business.”

 

“What business?” Schuldig sat up from where he had been lounging on one elbow. The idea of Farfarello leaving now did not sit well with him for several reasons: he did not want to be cooped up here with Nagi and Crawford with nothing to do; knowing what was awaiting them, the idea of one of them taking off alone did not bode well; and much like a cat having declared the couch as its personal property after rolling around on it once and leaving cat hairs all over it, Schuldig felt quite attached to the Irishman for the time being.

 

“I have contracts to fulfill, Schu.” Farfarello sat down on the floor and pulled his boots closer.

 

“I’ll come with you.” He got up and held up a hand as it looked as though Farfarello would protest. “Just let me tag along. No harm done, right?”

 

Farfarello laced his boots. “Take a shower first. They’ll smell you from a mile away if you don’t. And…don’t leave your guns behind.”

 

\---

 

Tokyo Harbor, half past five in the morning, was a busy place to be, Schuldig decided as he looked over the men and women working between the storage buildings and the ships. The morning air was quite cool, and he crossed his arms over his chest as he felt the first chills begin to wander over his skin. Next to him, Farfarello sat on a wooden crate, turning a metal rod over and over in his hands, his eye fixed on a point in the distance where ocean and sky met. The Irishman had been silent and brooding ever since they had left the Seventh Serpent, and on the car ride to the harbor, they had not spoken more than five words.

 

He began to ask himself if going with Farfarello had not been a bad idea after all. He had no clue why they were here, it was cold, and the reviving potency of the cup of coffee was beginning to lose its magic.

 

“I think they’ll come by ship,” Farfarello said suddenly.

 

Schuldig turned just in time to see him twist the metal rod in his hands. On both ends, the rod suddenly extended, leaving the entire thing a good five feet long. Schuldig recognized the bladed weapon that had hung in Farfarello’s living room. Another twist and the blades snapped out on either side, slender but deadly.

 

“It’s the easiest way in. Unless they plan to come by plane, which I doubt they will. They won’t travel alone, and a large plane landing somewhere will be looked at not only by the authorities.” Farfarello continued, giving the rod a final twist. With the sound of metal teeth interlocking somewhere inside the weapon, he was now left with a two-headed spear.

 

“Yeah, maybe.” Schuldig studied the spear and wondered why Farfarello did not use guns. They were more efficient, secure. Perhaps it was a pride thing. Farfarello liked to fight up and close and did not mind being shot several times, Schuldig knew.

 

He turned from the Irishman and looked out over the part of the harbor called Tsukiji Fish Market. They were at its East end, where industrial freighters had unloaded a vast number of large metal crates onto an elevated platform, containing vegetables from overseas, as the signs on them indicated. Although Tokyo Harbor long since had ceased to be the central point for the fish business and in these days served as a mostly industrial harbor, Schuldig thought he could still smell the distinct fish and rot odor of hundreds of years of fish having wandered from hand to hand here. The district they were in, Tsukiji, seemed drenched with it.

 

Farfarello’s idea was not far off the list of possibilities. Schuldig walked to the edge of the platform and scanned the harbor from side to side. Nobody would notice a moderately large ship anchoring at one of the many piers in the middle of the night. There were a number of harbors in Europe – Greece, Spain, only to think of a two – Eszet could use for their Exodus.

 

“There.”

 

He turned and saw Farfarello rise from the crate, twirling the spear once in his right hand. He followed Farfarello’s line of sight and saw a group of men file out of a storage building halfway between their location and the West end of the harbor. Due to the distance, he could not make out faces. Farfarello began to descend the metal staircase that lead up to the platform, and Schuldig walked after him.

 

“Who are they?”

 

“Daiki Nakamura’s little mob. They’re from Kyoto, trying to gain a foothold here after they’ve been driven from the old town by another group.” Farfarello waited at the foot of the stairs, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Someone’s paying me a handsome sum if they’ll never set foot here again.”

 

The small group began to move toward Schuldig and Farfarello’s location. Schuldig counted eight men, and as they came closer, he began to hear the first echoes of their thoughts. Mostly, their thoughts revolved around ‘merchandise’. Schuldig turned and glanced at the metal crates on top of the platform. No vegetables, but steel and platinum wiring meant for a power plant in Korea, intercepted along the way and shipped through Tokyo Harbor, where the new owners planned to sell it. He opened his jacket and slipped a gun out of its holster, flipping the safety off with his thumb.

 

“Who pays you?” Schuldig asked.

 

Farfarello did not turn as he answered him. “Someone.”

 

The group of men was no more than 50 feet away as the man who headed them discovered Schuldig and Farfarello at the foot of the stairs and stopped, holding a hand up. The rest of the group stopped as well. The telepath latched onto their minds and swiped through them, meeting mistrust, surprise, anger. Hands went for guns beneath jackets. The leader of the group stepped forward and slowly walked toward Schuldig and Farfarello, his hands down his sides. Schuldig took in their surroundings and noted places where he could take cover behind crates.

 

“You know, Schu…there’s a few things I think I should tell you.” Farfarello was looking at the man, whom Schuldig knew to be Daiki Nakamura, who still came toward them in the same slow manner in which he had started.

 

Schuldig blinked and looked at the Irishman. The last thing he saw before the world was dipped into darkness was one of the spear blades coming at his head in an arc, then a sharp pain, then black, then nothing.

 

\---

 

_He thinks he dreams he wakes._

 

_Sound of water crashing against a shore. Smell of blood and oil in the air. The harbor? No, not the harbor, but close to it. Bodies strewn over the wet sand so much like rag dolls. From somewhere, he hears the cawing sound of a crow, and he thinks he can hear the beating of wings. There is something covering his eyes, and for a long, terrifying moment, Schuldig thinks he is in a body bag, and they have readied him to be shipped off to the morgue. But he is still alive! Alive._

 

_He comes to his senses and realizes it is his hair hanging into his eyes. Sand clings to his skin and his wet clothes._

 

_Like a rush, memory comes back to him. The floor giving under his feet, yawning abysses reaching for his fragile body with the power of crumbling stone behind their snapping jaws. The roar of the ocean as he plunged to it. Around him, the frantic thoughts of people struggling to fight against death as they are maimed between falling stone, metal, and metal and stone and water. Then water, and salt, and the mad, mind-tearing need for air. Bubbles in the water like parasols rising from wet to air, and he follows them, and then leaves it to the waves to wash his body ashore._

 

_The gunshot is loud and destroys the lulling comfort of knowing he is alive, replacing it with the urgent sense of danger nearby. But no danger, only Crawford, killing a crow that feasts on the ragged corpse of an Eszet minion._

 

_There is an arm wrapped around Schuldig’s middle. Pale, wet. He blinks as drops of water roll into his eyes and crawls away from the arm, toward Crawford, who nearly shoots him. As he sits and waits for Crawford to stop puking seawater, a humming starts in the right side of his head, sitting directly between the skin and the bone of his skull. It sounds like a swarm of bees squeezed into too small a space. He reaches up and cradles his head in his hands, trying to make that humming go away, but instead of receding, it becomes louder, and louder, and louder, until it is all he can hear. Loud enough to make him scream. Words beneath the humming. An abyss in his very mind. Jaws made of words._

 

_He thinks he dreams_ he wakes.

 

The humming was still there. Schuldig did not open his eyes and listened to the humming until he realized he was listening to a generator or motor of some sort. It did not help the pounding in his head, which was concentrated on the left side of his skull. His face felt swollen.

 

He opened his eyes and stared at a familiar blue ceiling. Something itched in the back of his mind, trying to remind him of where he had seen that ceiling before. The humming stopped, making it easier to think. The scene at the harbor came back to him, slowly, ending abruptly at the scene where Farfarello had swung the spear at him. Confusion reigned but briefly, making way for anger. Farfarello had _knocked him out_? Why?

 

He tried to sit up and found himself restrained. His upper body was strapped to whatever he was lying on with a wide leather strap. He tried to move his hands but could only move them a few inches, feeling something wrapped around his wrists and connected to his thighs. His ankles were restrained as well. At least he could move his head, and he did, looking at his surroundings as the pounding behind his skull gradually began to fade away. The room was bare except for what Schuldig saw was a bed, which he occupied. The floor was bleak, gray concrete. There were no windows, only a door. The dim light came from a lamp let into the center of the ceiling.

 

Farfarello was sitting, leaned against the door. His right hand was gripping a long, slender stiletto. He did not look up as Schuldig tried to accommodate himself better despite the restraints, occupied with slicing a design into the inside of his left arm. Schuldig, watching him, had a flashback of Farfarello sitting on the floor of his cell after the incident with his mother: the Irishman had been rocking back and forth, crouched on the balls of his feet, an eerie whining sound coming from his throat as a blade cut the word ‘Mother’ into the flesh of his arm over and over again, lines crisscrossing, blood mingling.

 

Had it been show, or had it been true regret and anguish? Schuldig did not know. Five years ago, he would have thought Farfarello was mourning. Today, he was not sure if it had not just been a show. He tilted his head to the side as far as he could and thought he could hear the blade Farfarello was using now, whispering through pale skin to the red that lay beneath.

 

“Farfarello?”

 

He did not receive an answer, not even the acknowledgement that he was even in the same room. He tugged on his restraints despite the improbability of being able to free himself that way. The stony silence in the room, interrupted only by his own breathing and the rustling of the bed beneath him, was slowly seeping into the telepath and forming a cold, knotted coil in the pit of his stomach. Fear was not an emotion Schuldig was overly familiar with. The few times he had been afraid in his life had been brief and over quickly.

 

Now, here, lying on a bed in a room that could be nowhere and everywhere, fear was a damp cloth that covered his face like a shroud. He tugged on his restraints again, forcefully this time.

 

“Farfarello, what the fuck are you doing? Look at me, damn it!”

 

Farfarello lifted his head and the blade dug deep. A squirt of blood hit his cheek right beneath his seeing eye and then rolled down to drip off his jaw. Schuldig involuntarily sucked air in through his teeth. The expression on Farfarello’s face teetered between amusement and insanity. The pupil in his eye shrunk to a pint point, the gold surrounding it so light it seemed to glow.

 

“They told me they’d let us leave.” Farfarello said slowly. He pushed himself up against the door and then stood there, half off-kilter, leaned against it as though his legs would not carry him. “They said if I didn’t interfere, nothing would happen.”

 

“They? Who are they?” Schuldig nearly shouted. Things were very quickly not beginning to make much sense anymore. Farfarello behaved as though his _sanity_ had been a show. Schuldig forced himself to take a deep breath and to hold the piercing glare fixed on him. He was at a severe disadvantage here.

 

“You know who I mean, Schu.” Farfarello raised the knife he still held in his hand to his face and stuck the tip between his lips as though he was sucking on a lollipop. He blinked as his lower and upper lip split on the edges of the knife and then licked the blood from them, dragging the tip of the knife down his chin before he let his arm sink again.

 

Schuldig stared at the stained lips and then flinched as Farfarello pushed himself away from the door and almost fell toward the bed. Although he wanted to force himself to keep eye contact, he could not keep himself from looking at the knife as Farfarello sat down on the edge of the bed at his side and leaned over him, so close Schuldig could smell the blood on his breath. The knife ended up on his other side, pressed into the mattress beneath him by Farfarello’s hand.

 

No, he did not like this situation. He had not liked many things that had happened lately, but this topped it. He bared his teeth at the Irishman as anger won out over reason – again.

 

“Eszet. You bastard.” Schuldig yanked his head to the side as Farfarello’s free hand stroked down his cheek. “What did they offer you?”

 

The smile was as soft as it was insane. “You.”

 

Nothing made sense anymore. “Me? What -? How -?” He forced a calming breath. “You’ve _got_ to be kidding me.”

 

Farfarello sat up straight, and Schuldig blinked as the insanity vanished from his expression as quickly as it had come. The Irishman shook his hair back and tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling.

 

“It’s quite simple, really. They want Japan for themselves, and renegade Gifted like us are in the way. The new Elders aren’t like the old ones, though. They see a killed Gifted as a waste of talent.”

 

“Oh, I see. And that’s why they tried not to kill Crawford, right? When did they contact you? How did they find you?”

 

“I was here all the time, Schu. They didn’t have to look far. How many white-haired, yellow-eyed Irishmen do you know?”

 

“Stop with the fucking sarcasm, Far, this isn’t funny.” Schuldig yanked on the restraints of his wrists. “Untie me. At once.”

 

“No. You’ll just run off and try to warn Crawford.” Farfarello’s brows lowered. “Maybe you should think about it. Maybe -”

 

“Think about it my ass!” Schuldig spat. “What’s there to think about? What the _fuck_ is really going on here?”

 

“Schuldig, listen to me. You think this is all a game, don’t you? You think you can sleaze your way out of this like you did so often, you think you can just walk in and then walk away again.” Farfarello leaned so far forward his and Schuldig’s noses were nearly touching. “No one can just walk away from it.”

 

Schuldig blinked, staring at Farfarello’s eye from scant centimeters away. Was it concern he saw in that face, or was it a farce, a façade, put on by a man who made less and less sense to him? He had an idea of what had happened, of what Farfarello thought was going to happen. Leaving aside the other burning questions swarming in his head, Schuldig thought he knew the answer to one.

 

“They approached you before Crawford and I even got here, didn’t they?”

 

Farfarello appeared startled for a moment, but it passed quickly. Schuldig had the impression he was being studied, evaluated, and the seconds ticked by so slowly he felt like screaming after an eternity seemed to have passed. In the end, Farfarello did not answer, which to Schuldig was answer enough.

 

“You listen to me now, Farfarello. Listen well. I thought _I_ was fucked up, but _you_ have a real problem there, pal.” Schuldig took a deep breath. He was trembling with anger. “I don’t know what goes on in that head of yours, and I’m not sure anymore I want to know. But I know one thing. I don’t need you to save me. If you think I’m just going to walk away with you, think again. If you think two fucks are enough to make you master of what happens to me, think again. Eszet couldn’t buy me, what makes you think _you_ can?”

 

The chortle came as a surprise. Farfarello straightened up and looked at Schuldig out of the corner of his eye, an expression on his face that teetered between belittling and humoring.

 

“What makes you think I want you to walk away with me?” Farfarello pulled his arm back toward himself and let the tip of the knife drag over Schuldig’s stomach, barely touching the cloth of the telepath’s shirt. It was enough to make Schuldig’s stomach muscles clench, but he forced himself to keep looking at the Irishman. “Maybe I’m just playing with you. Ever considered that?”

 

The Irishman’s hand moved so quickly it was but a blur of motion beneath Schuldig’s chin, leaving the telepath no time to react. He did react, a moment later, to the feeling of blood running down from the underside of his chin to his throat – for a terribly long moment, he thought Farfarello had cut across his throat, and he drew his next breath almost fearfully, baring his teeth at the Irishman, who watched him with an air of detachment. Farfarello held the knife between his knees, out of Schuldig’s sight.

 

“You -” Schuldig began.

 

“When I was a child,” Farfarello interrupted him, “I thought everything happened because it’s meant to happen. I thought we all had our predestined place and role. Am I boring you, Schuldig? Too bad. I’m afraid you’re in no position to complain. When I grew older I learned that nothing is fate. It’s all in how you do it. You should be familiar with that; your expertise in setting someone on a different path of fate must be phenomenal.”

 

“Get to the point,” Schuldig growled.

 

“I watched you, for a long time. I watched you play with others, and I liked it. And somewhere along the way, I realized I wanted to try it myself. I am, now. Playing.”

 

Schuldig gaze slipped to Farfarello’s hand as it moved again, the knife having mysteriously disappeared. The Irishman’s pale fingers plucked at something out of Schuldig’s line of sight. He felt the restraint holding his right wrist in place loosen and turned his wrist, then yanked it across his own chest as soon as there was enough give in the restraint, his finger sliding along the restraint on his other wrist and finding the buckle. It was similar to a belt buckle and easy enough to open; he did not need to see it. Instead, Schuldig looked back at Farfarello and saw him rise from the bed.

 

“A storm is coming, Schu.” Farfarello looked at something on the ceiling and did not pay attention to what Schuldig was doing. “And it will be the biggest shit storm of all times.”

 

Indeed, it would be, Schuldig vowed silently, his hands now working furiously on the buckle that kept the strap around his upper body down. The storm would hit as soon as he was free of these restraints and had his hands around Farfarello’s throat. There were a number of possibilities here, and none was particularly to his liking.

 

Farfarello was insane and had played at sanity. If that was the case, then he was a fucking good actor. Good enough to not only fool Schuldig, but also Crawford and Nagi into believing he had been sane while having been insane all along in reality.

 

Farfarello was sane and had played at insanity for years, and again just now. It was the possibility Schuldig had believed up to now, but it was fraying at the edges and cracking apart from inside. Or was it? He was not sure anymore what was real and what was…a game. A play. Farfarello’s own words.

 

Farfarello was neither or something else entirely.

 

If Schuldig had a choice, he would wish for Farfarello to be insane. No, that was a lie. If he had a choice, he would wish none of this had ever happened, they had never broken apart or never met in the first place, and everyone was still behaving the way Schuldig was used to. Crawford’s words came back to him, telling him he had not changed. And indeed, he hadn’t, but the world around him, the people he had been used to, had, and they had changed so profoundly no but in reality only Farfarello had changed and Schuldig wondered why it meant so much and so little and _fuck_ would these restraints around his ankles never give under his fingers and why the hell wasn’t Farfarello moving with Schu obviously ten seconds short of killing him and he thinks he dreams he –

 

\---

 

\- woke to pain so bright and clear it reminded him of the two tiny cuts Farfarello had made in his flesh when they had had sex on Farfarello’s odd bed in the loft above the bar, only a door between them and Crawford.

 

That pain had been indulgent, sweet. The pain he was feeling now was sharp and ugly and pressed against his left temple like a heavy weight, accompanied by painful throbbing that sent its echoes down into the very base of his spine. He rolled onto his side and curled up, threading his fingers through his hair and feeling blood stick to them. Had he gotten the ankle restraints off? Had he and Farfarello fought, there in that room with the blue ceiling and the single light, and had he lost and was now waking to the results of his defeat?

 

He forced his eyes open and stared at the side of someone’s ruined face. Ruined, because the nose was flattened and blood was running from the nostrils into the black hair at the temple of the man’s head; ruined, because the lower part of the jaw was missing, a bloody, jagged mess in its place, the upper front teeth like domino stones stuck in red jelly.

 

Schuldig remained in his fetal position with his hands clamped into his hair and stared at the corpse as sounds began to filter through the throbbing and the dull thunder behind his temples. As it was, he had no desire to move: that dream had rattled him enough to make him want to lie still and not think about anything for a while.

 

That idea was short-lived. A boot crashed down in front of Schuldig’s face, giving him ample opportunity to observe that it was black, military style, had a scuffed toe, and that blood and bits of bone were stuck to the outer side of the thick soles. Above him, a high, whining sound cut through the air, followed by a gurgle and a choked scream. The boot in front of Schuldig’s face moved, and he looked up, following a leather-clad leg and rolling onto his back in the process.

 

“Póg mo thón! [4]”Farfarello, standing with spread legs directly above Schuldig’s head, uttered a curse in what Schuldig assumed was his native tongue and made a wild swing with both arms, from what Schuldig could see. Then the Irishman was gone from above him, and the sounds of fighting commenced a little further away from Schuldig’s location.

 

The telepath grunted and sat up, his hands still in their place at his head. The head rush that followed made him dizzy and sick to the stomach, an effect for which head injuries are famous. Carefully, he slid his fingertips over his left temple, fearing that any second, they would sink into the pulverized bone of his skull and the tissue of his brain. Horror stories read in newspapers came to his mind, about people who had walked away from accidents with their skulls cracked open and bone fragments driven into their craniums or frontal lobes. The brain itself feels no pain.

 

Around him, several corpses littered the ground. Schuldig took those in along with the relief of finding nothing but cut skin and a large lump on his left temple. Head injuries were prone to bleed a lot, he knew. What had happened? The corpses around him were all Japanese. Schuldig saw Daiki Nakamura’s head rolled against a crate – a crate? He looked around and saw that he was sitting near the foot of the stairs Farfarello and he had descended earlier – how much earlier? How much time had passed?

 

Enough time for the Irishman to dispose of every single member of Daiki Nakamura’s little mob, apparently. But there were other corpses, of fairer coloring, between the black-haired Japanese. He counted five, all of them having the height and coloring of Caucasians. Bleakly, Schuldig focused on the moving shapes in front of him. The black-clad one, that was Farfarello. The Irishman was holding his spear-shaped weapon in both hands and making wild but precise swings with it. His adversary, Schuldig saw as his vision began to clear up, was a tall, sandy-haired man clad in Jeans and sweater, and the stranger was fighting with the strength of the possessed.

 

He was fighting very well, Schuldig noticed after watching them both for a few seconds. Although the man did not seem to be holding any weapon, he managed to evade every of Farfarello’s attacks simply by moving as though he was anticipating them. Schuldig blinked and reached inside his jacket, slipping one of his guns out of its holster. Too fast. Too fast, so fast movement was blurry and surreal. He felt another wave of dizziness roll over him and had to blink as black spots appeared in front of his eyes, merging with and dancing away from Farfarello’s black clothing.

 

_Hey asshole!_

 

The stranger, startled by the broad mental call Schuldig had sent out, stopped for the fraction of a second in his movement, and the telepath used this moment to train his aim on a spot between the man’s light eyes and shoot him. Farfarello whirled around, spear still gripped tightly in both hands, and looked around for the source of the gunshot until his glance fell on Schuldig, who let his hand sink to the ground between his legs and cradled his head again with his other hand. The gunshot was echoing off the insides of his skull like a ping-pong ball. He wanted nothing more but a quiet place where he could rest his head and let those echoes die away and take care of his head injury.

 

That idea was short-lived as well. Schuldig made a wordless complaint as two hands gripped him beneath the arms and pulled him to his feet. His legs, surprisingly, were holding him rather well. He swayed a bit and fell against Farfarello, who cursed again and nearly fell over as well before he managed to steady them both.

 

“I feel sick,” Schuldig said. The longer he stood upright, the better he felt, he realized. He took a deep gulp of air and looked around them, hearing the howl of sirens in the distance. Someone had alerted the authorities. “Manx’ll have work to do.”

 

“You puke on me, you die,” Farfarello informed him gruffly. “We got to get moving.”

 

Schuldig took another deep breath and nodded. Although the now surreal-seeming images from his dream, no, his dream in a dream, were still hanging onto his mind like sticky cobwebs, he agreed with Farfarello. He glanced at the Irishman as the spear was reduced to its inconspicuous size, though now slippery with blood. Farfarello’s hands and arms were slippery with blood. Schuldig looked at Farfarello’s face and, now there was a novelty, it was blood-spattered as well.

 

Farfarello walked around Schuldig and disappeared beneath the staircase, dragging Schuldig behind him by the sleeve.

 

“What the fuck happened? I remember you saying something and then swinging that thingy of yours at me…”

 

Farfarello let go of Schuldig’s sleeve and knelt. On the ground in front of him was the round lid of an entrance to what Schuldig guessed was Tokyo’s sewer system. Farfarello hooked his fingers into the holes in the heavy lid and heaved, baring a black hole in the ground.

 

“Saw something move out of the corner of my eye and when I turned around, someone was pointing a gun at you.” Farfarello sat down on the edge of the hold and felt around with one foot. “I had to bat you out of the way, but the bullet grazed the side of your head, I think.”

 

The telepath made a sound of disgust at the smell that rose from the opening in the ground and felt bile rise in his throat, his already twitchy stomach rumbling. Someone had pointed a gun at him? From _behind_ him? This worried him. It was hard to sneak up on someone who could hear malicious thoughts from a mile away, and from this close proximity; he should have heard the proverbial fly cough.

 

“Eszet,” Schuldig said, more to himself than to the Irishman, who slipped into the hole and looked up at Schuldig, only his head and shoulders still visible.

 

“Yeah. Nakamura and his men didn’t know what hit them. They actually helped me because they started shooting at them.”

 

Schuldig followed Farfarello down into the hole and soon stood in a low tunnel lit by dirty security lights. The rancid smell was overwhelming. He waited until Farfarello had pulled the lid back onto the entrance from inside and held his arm in front of his mouth and nose, breathing through the fabric of his jacket. From above, the sirens’ song was very close now.

 

The weight of what Farfarello had said came down on him as he followed the Irishman through the tunnel. Eszet had found them. How, he could only guess. But they had been good enough to find him and Farfarello at the harbor and attack them there. What bothered Schuldig most was the fact that he had not heard the attack come, that it had surprised him. It meant the people who had attacked them had been more than ordinary humans; they had to have been Gifted, able to shield themselves well enough to make their presence undetectable.

 

And that, Schuldig knew, was like trying not to think about pink elephants. He had never heard of anyone who could shield themselves so well not even a trace of their individuality remained. It was like wiping your own being from the face of the earth.

 

He stared at Farfarello’s back as they passed beneath a lamp and saw two bullet holes in the fabric of Farfarello’s sweater. One beneath his right shoulder blade, the other a little higher, in the fleshy bridge between neck and shoulder. Still, a nagging doubt began to make itself noticed and remained. Farfarello was blind on one eye and had been standing with his back to Schuldig. How could he have seen something _behind_ Schuldig? Granted, Farfarello had sharp hearing, but Schuldig’s hearing was good enough that he should have heard something as well. Furthermore, he doubted Eszet would send out a group consisting only of telepaths. He had not heard a single thought other than those of Daiki Nakamura and his men, and his own, and some faraway whispers of the people working at the harbor.

 

_You’re lying to me_ , Schuldig thought.

 

After what he estimated had been twenty minutes, they reached a rusty ladder. Schuldig waited until Farfarello had moved the lid at the end of the ladder to the side and then climbed out after him. The narrow street, ending in a brick wall like so many others in the forgotten parts of a city, permitted little light to reach them down where they stood. Schuldig lifted his face and looked at the sky, feeling the first drops of rain on his cheeks. The thunder behind his temple had receded to a low but easily ignored steady drumming. A scraping sound as Farfarello moved the lid back into its place, and they were walking down the narrow street, beneath a narrow, gray sky.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**January 22 nd, 2002, Tokyo**

**O910 Hours**

 

“This doesn’t really look like a bullet wound.” Crawford said quietly.

 

Schuldig held his hair back with one hand and dabbed a cotton ball drenched with iodine against the wound on his left temple. It stung, but the pain was bearable, and it was by far better than having an infected open wound right on the side of his head. He studied the wound in the bathroom mirror: roughly four inches long, the edges straight, not ragged, as most bullet wounds will be. Although the flesh along the edges of the wound was raised, the cut was clean and precise and looked more like a knife wound.

 

Or a spear wound.

 

Schuldig and Farfarello had returned to the Seventh Serpent half an hour ago. Their trip through the sewers had taken them straight to Minato, a district neighboring Tokyo Harbor, where Farfarello had parked his Jeep. On their way back to Ginza, they had passed at least 20 police cars with blinking lights and sirens, but no one stopped the black Jeep that came from the direction of the harbor, and no one bothered them as they parked the car at the end of the street that lead to the Seventh Serpent and walked up to the bar. Farfarello had gone straight up into the loft and taken a shower. Schuldig had sent Crawford, who leaned against the long table in the main room of the loft with narrowed eyes and an expectant expression on his face, a short mental order to keep quiet and ask questions later. Nagi had been sleeping at the end of the table, his head pillowed on his arms, his face pale from exhaust.

 

“No, it doesn’t,” Schuldig said as quietly. He dropped the cotton ball into the sink and washed his hands.

 

Crawford moved out of the way as Schuldig walked into the bedroom and looked around. Farfarello was not here; Schuldig looked at the shut bedroom door and crooked his finger at the American. They retreated to the window.

 

“Listen,” Crawford said in a low voice, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I had a vision as soon as you were gone.”

 

Schuldig, mouth open to tell Crawford what had happened, held back and said, “Go on.”

 

“You know I can’t see Farfarello with my Gift. But I saw you, and subsequently I could see him as well. He attacked you, Schu. He attacked you with that weapon of his and knocked you out.” Crawford lowered his voice even more. “There was a group of men approaching you. I saw him talk to them and then attack them. That’s where it broke off.”

 

Doubt is a wonderful thing. It turns friends into enemies and sets family members against each other; doubt is the black-clothed sister of trust, and she knows the way into the hearts of humanity better than love. Schuldig’s mouth turned down at the corners at Crawford’s words, and he felt the doubt he had been feeling ever since Farfarello told him what supposedly had happened turn into a solid, stale block on the back of his tongue.

 

“He told me someone behind me had pointed a gun at me.”

 

Crawford shook his head. “No. It was him. For a second I thought he was going to cut your head off with that thing.”

 

“Does the name Daiki Nakamura mean anything to you?”

 

“No. Who is that?”

 

“According to Farfarello, a mob boss from Kyoto. He was with the men Farfarello killed at the harbor. He said someone was paying him to take care of Nakamura.” Schuldig glanced at the bedroom door. “Where is Farfarello now?”

 

“Left as soon as you stepped into the bathroom. He said he had to go fetch something.”

 

“Mh. Where is Nagi?”

 

“Still asleep at the table.” Crawford leaned closer. “Schu, what the hell is going on?”

 

“Eszet agents were at the harbor. I don’t know how they ended up there, but Farfarello killed them as well.”

 

Crawford’s face bore an expression of extreme surprise that quickly changed into one of quiet anger. He brushed his hands through his hair, looked at the door and then back at Schuldig, and exhaled explosively.

 

“Crawford, unless they’ve been tailing us from here to the harbor, I don’t know how else they could have found us. It would be a bit too much of a coincidence if a group of Eszet agents happened to be there at the same time Farfarello and I were there. What bothers me most is that I didn’t _hear_ them. I passed out, but I couldn’t have been gone for longer than a few minutes. When I woke back up, Farfarello was killing the last of them.”

 

“He talked to Nakamura, if that was who he was talking to, but that only lasted a minute or two.”

 

“Yeah.” Schuldig searched his pockets for a cigarette but did not find one. He gratefully accepted one from the pack Crawford held out to him. “Thanks.” He lit the cigarette and sank to his haunches, his back against the wall behind him. “This is so fucked up. I don’t know what to believe anymore and least of all if I should believe anything Farfarello tells me.”

 

“There could be a number of reasons…” Crawford trailed off and started wandering back and forth. Five steps, turn, five steps, turn. “He had enough opportunity to kill all of us, so I don’t think that’s what he’s aiming for.”

 

Schuldig recalled the dream, recalled what the dream Farfarello had offered him, and nodded mutely.

 

“It’s all connected somehow. He works as a paid killer. He’s sent out to take care of mob bosses and whoever else gets in the way…whose way? His?” Crawford stopped in mid-stride and looked down at Schuldig. “Eszet’s,” he answered his own question. “Let’s just pretend for a second it was Eszet. No, let’s go further than that. Let’s pretend Eszet had gotten in contact with Farfarello before we got in contact with him and offered him something in return for a few favors. Money, territory, I don’t know. Whatever strikes his fancy.”

 

_I deal in whatever gets me through the day_. Schuldig took a hungry drag on the cigarette. Farfarello’s own words and the idea that ‘whatever’ included working for Eszet was not too far to grasp. He had a hard time believing it, but looking at what had happened at the harbor, Schuldig had to admit it was very much a possibility. Farfarello on Eszet’s side, working for them? It felt like a fist to the stomach. It meant everything they had said in Farfarello’s presence had most likely ended up with the new Elders already. It would explain how the Eszet agents had found them at the harbor.

 

Not found them, Schuldig corrected himself. _Met_ them.

 

A fraction of an image turned in Schuldig’s mind, and much like a scientist will sometimes have the breakthrough idea out of nowhere, now the telepath saw a piece of the puzzle he thought he had solved a few days ago reverse itself and slide into another empty slot.

 

“Shit.” He crushed the cigarette out on the floor and straightened up. “God. It all plays together, doesn’t it? Your uncle comes here on the same day Terry Garfield ‘attacks’ Farfarello. Maybe it wasn’t even Terry Garfield, it could have been anyone. Weyland was conditioned. I thought seeing Garfield’s corpse had set him off, but what if it wasn’t Garfield but something else?”

 

Crawford frowned. “What do you mean?”

 

“Farfarello! It was Farfarello!” Schuldig nearly laughed and held a hand to his brow. “God, how could I have been so blind?”

 

“What -”

 

“Crawford, don’t you think it’s too much of a coincidence Weyland spontaneously ignited as soon as he saw Garfield’s corpse? And why the hell did Farfarello keep the body on ice, anyone could break into that house and find it. It’s even in the same street as his bar here. Weyland was conditioned, but I think it was Farfarello who set him off.”

 

“How?” Crawford asked, his voice cold.

 

“His Gift. He’s a Biokinetic, isn’t he? He made Nagi contain Weyland in a telekinetic shield, he made you walk out of the house against your will, and he -” Schuldig closed his mouth with a snap and blinked. “And he silenced my mind just by touching me. He didn’t touch you when he moved you. God. That’s how he hid the Eszet agents at the harbor.”

 

\---

 

Nagi was everything but happy to be so roughly woken, Schuldig could tell from the death-glare the Japanese sent both him and Crawford as the American shook him from well-deserved sleep.

 

“You want me to check _what_?” Nagi asked gruffly and dragged his laptop closer, knuckling sleep from his eyes.

 

“Farfarello’s bank accounts and financial transfers over the last five years.” Crawford sat down on the chair at the corner of the table and sent a glance at the door to the loft. “And be quiet about it.”

 

Schuldig walked to the head of the stairs that lead down into the bar and glanced at the darkened room below to find it deserted. When he turned around, his eyes automatically scanned the ceiling of the loft, remembering how Reiji Takatori had had Schwarz’s place rigged with eavesdropping devices. There did not seem to be anything suspicious on the ceiling or in the corners. He did not think Farfarello would rig his own living quarters, but a nagging doubt remained – doubt, Schuldig thought sourly, was about the only thing he associated with Farfarello now.

 

Nagi blinked, his fingers positioned over the keys of his laptop. “Farfarello’s – why?”

 

“Don’t ask, just do it,” Crawford said, his voice tight.

 

“His real name is Jay O’Siodhachain,” Schuldig said and walked to the other side of the table, from where he had a good view of the open door. He would hear it if someone came up those steps.

 

Would he? Farfarello had easily silenced his mind, how much harder would it be to silence – no, to _erase_ his own presence from someone’s ears? Schuldig inwardly shook his head as he contemplated how precise Farfarello’s control over his Gift must be. How many years it must have taken to bring it to perfection with all of them looking on and not noticing it, without _anyone_ noticing it.

 

“Could you _spell_ that, please?” Nagi snapped.

 

Crawford spelled, and Nagi’s fingers flew over the keyboard. Schuldig, one eye on the small screen of the laptop and the other eye on the door, had no idea what programs Nagi was using to trace information, but he knew they were good and fast, and illegal. It did not take more than a minute for the screen of the laptop to blink and then spill a list of numbers out for them.

 

“Here we go…National Bank of Tokyo, two accounts. Deutsche Bank, one account. What the hell…a German account? How many accounts does he have? Swiss National Bank, one account.” Nagi whistled through his teeth and scrolled. “He’s a fucking millionaire. Look at this: he’s just recently made a transfer of two million American Dollars to the Swiss Bank account. Why am I looking this up?”

 

“How recent is the two million transfer?” Crawford asked.

 

“February 10th.” Nagi sent Crawford an inquiring glance. “What the hell is going on?”

 

“Can you trace where that money came from?” Schuldig asked, elbows on his knees.

 

“Yes. It’s going to take a moment, though. The Swiss bank accounts are guarded like Fort Knox.”

 

The steady, fast clicking of keys fell into the strained silence that lasted over the three. Schuldig regarded Crawford from under his hair and gently probed the American’s mind. He was not surprised at the anger and the confusion he found, nor did he stop to marvel at the overwhelming feeling of betrayal. He was feeling the same. But for Crawford, the betrayal ran deeper. Schuldig did not know how much insight Farfarello had into the plans of Eszet, but the possibility that the Irishman had known about the assassination plans for Crawford – for all of them – was there. Although Crawford did not go so far as to outright blame Farfarello for the death of his wife and daughter, Schuldig could feel the American wanted to.

 

He leaned back in the chair. What was Farfarello doing? What was he planning? Crawford was right about one thing – if Farfarello had wanted them dead, they would be dead now. Something in him twisted as he remembered Farfarello’s hand guiding the small knife so precisely against his skin, evoking pleasure in the wake of pain. The thought of what else the Irishman could have done with that knife…

 

He had been deluding himself. _Everything_ had changed. Nevertheless, he had been looking for those changes in the wrong places; he had seen them and not seen them. His ego smarted at the thought of Farfarello leading them all around by the nose. For how long had this been going on?

 

“Here we go.” Nagi pushed the laptop away from himself and pointed at a blinking line on the screen. “Two million American Dollars, deposited here at the Tokyo National Bank on February 9th by a Daiki Nakamura and sent to the Swiss bank account on the 10th.”

 

Schuldig glanced at Crawford. Daiki Nakamura. The mob boss Farfarello had killed this morning in the Tsukiji Fish Market.

 

“I want to know everything about Daiki Nakamura,” Crawford said evenly, and leaned back in his chair.

 

“I’m not touching one more key until one of you tells me what the hell is going on,” Nagi said in much the same tone of voice, and leaned back as well, his arms crossed over his chest.

 

\---

 

Daiki Nakamura, age 53, father of a daughter enrolled in Kyoto University. CEO of a small pharmaceutical company situated in Kyoto, funded with money made from illegal drug deals. He had been a founding member of one of Japan’s largest drug rings in the 70’s but retired from the deadly business a few years ago to deal on a smaller scale. Just recently, he had started acting on a few offers from overseas, mostly dealing with the rerouting of crates such as those Schuldig had seen at Tokyo Harbor earlier this morning. Nakamura’s job had been to intercept the ‘merchandise’ on its way and reroute it to its new owners, a risky business that earned him quite a lot of money.

 

Nakamura had not been, as Farfarello had told Schuldig, a small fish chased from its pond in Kyoto. The Japanese had been in Tokyo strictly on business, and Schuldig suspected he would have returned to Kyoto if he hadn’t met his end at the hands of one certain Irishman, whose role in this entire scheme made less and less sense to Schuldig.

 

In the information Nagi had gleaned, there was not a single indicator that Nakamura had ever had something to do with Eszet. His bank records were clean. He had received money from overseas, but both sums were minor and came from a bank in Greece. Schuldig suspected Nakamura was part of an international smuggler ring. Why he had paid Farfarello two million American Dollars was a mystery as well.

 

“I can’t believe he’d do that.”

 

Schuldig glanced to the side. Nagi, in his place at the end of the table, cradled his head in both hands and stared at the tabletop as though he wanted to burn a hole into it with his eyes. The Japanese had taken the revelations rather well, Schuldig thought. The telepath couldn’t help feeling a cheap thrill of satisfaction – the discussion he had had with Nagi about whether or not they could trust Farfarello had been passing in Nagi’s mind as Crawford explained their suspicions to him, and Nagi was feeling as though the trust he had put in both the Irishman’s capabilities and character had been thrown in his face. Schuldig had been right, Nagi had been wrong. Given their current predicament, Schuldig sought solace in that knowledge, knowing at the same time that he, at one point, had trusted the Irishman enough to let him get close to him with a knife.

 

No, that was a lie. He had trusted him enough to fuck him.

 

“Neither can I,” Schuldig said quietly, drawing a glare from beneath lowered eyebrows from the Japanese. He sighed and put his knee against the edge of the table. Crawford was downstairs, rummaging through the Seventh Serpent’s tiny kitchen for something to eat.

 

“I wish I’d never come here.”

 

The telepath snorted. Now there was a thought he had had several times during the last two hours.

 

“I mean…Nakamura paying him two million Dollars and Farfarello then killing him doesn’t prove anything, does it?” Nagi spread his hands on the table in front of him. “We’ve done that ourselves, several times. Had someone pay us for whatever and then killed them to eliminate witnesses. Maybe we’re too fixed on pinning something on him because he seems too good a suspect right now.”

 

“Why do you keep defending him?” Schuldig asked, genuinely curious. “He killed your childhood love. He’s lead us around by the nose for days now, regardless of what we think he’s doing. He’s not telling us the truth; he outright lied to me, and for all we know he could be on the way back here with a small army of Eszet agents.”

 

“If you or Crawford truly believed that, we wouldn’t be here anymore,” Nagi pointed out.

 

“You didn’t answer my question.”

 

“I don’t _know_ , okay? Tot…she made her own choice. She didn’t have to confront him. She didn’t have to run up those stairs and try to get Fujimiya’s sister back from you.” The fingers moved on the table, tapping invisible keys. “I still remember what he said. ‘You’re in the way.’ And he was right, she was. I can’t blame him for what he did. I wish I could, it would make everything easier.”

 

Schuldig was amazed Nagi even still remembered Farfarello’s exact words. He would not have been able to remember them. The matter of Tot had been a dark chapter in the history of Schwarz. The girl had been a member of a group of female assassins who attracted the attention of Weiß and their own doom along with it. They had kidnapped Aya Fujimiya’s sister from a hospital before Schwarz had been able to make the same move; in the showdown that took place in an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of Tokyo, Schwarz had let Weiß and Schreient fight each other, using the chaos to kidnap the sister in return. Tot had tried to stop them, and Farfarello had killed her. The sight of his first true love – and Schuldig knew it had been true love in Nagi’s mind – impaled on Farfarello’s blade had snapped something inside Nagi. The youth had not spoken to any of them for nearly a month. Crawford and Schuldig had agreed to watch Nagi very closely, both fearing he would try his hand at retaliation and confront Farfarello about the death of Tot. However, Nagi had never acted, had never even harbored a malicious thought toward the Irishman, and had only mourned the death of the girl.

 

“I won’t believe he’s in league with Eszet until I hear it from his own mouth,” Nagi added tiredly.

 

“How can you still believe anything that comes from his mouth?”

 

Nagi did not answer. Schuldig did not feel like going through another discussion with him anyway, and hung after his own thoughts. He began to wonder where Farfarello had gone – the Irishman had been gone for nearly three hours now, and his absence was making Schuldig nervous. He did not want to think about the ‘what ifs’ that could be happening right now. The wound on the side of his head was throbbing in synch with his heartbeat, the harbinger of a headache. He desperately wanted to scratch the wound.

 

Both his and Nagi’s heads reared up as a distant crash reached them in the loft, followed by the sound of Crawford cursing. The telepath stretched and massaged his aching neck muscles, giving the Japanese at his side a glance.

 

“Any luck with the Eszet database?”

 

“No. I’ve tried every possible way. Either the information we’re looking for is hidden too well, or it isn’t there. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

 

Silence again. So this was what standing with your back to the wall and an army squad in front of you felt like, Schuldig mused. However, in their case, the wall was in front of them and the army squad behind them. And Farfarello seemed to be the key to unlock the bricks in the wall and allow them a glance at what lay behind. His gaze fell on the briefcase that contained the Lazarus Stone, placed on the long table a little away from them.

 

Why did Eszet want that stone? Without a host, it was practically useless. Although Schuldig doubted a certain star constellation was needed to work with the stone – the original Elders had made a pompous affair out of the Resurrection by claiming only an alignment of stars would bring forth the Lazarus Stone’s full power – what other use did it have?

 

“Nagi, do me a favor. See what information you can find about the Lazarus Stone.”

 

The Japanese nodded mutely; he was glad to have something to do, Schuldig read from his mind.

 

Footsteps on the stairs, and Crawford entered the loft, balancing a tray on one hand. In the other hand, he held a coffee pot.

 

“Fucking chaos down there,” the American muttered. He placed the tray on the table and passed out mugs and sandwiches. “I’m just glad the bar’s closed for business. Last thing I need now is listening to this Techno crap they play here.”

 

Closed for business, closed for business…Schuldig frowned and rose from his chair, taking a sip of coffee. He took his mug to the windows of the loft and looked out over the empty dance floor, traced the shapes of the tables and the chairs, then the shapes of the lights let into the ceiling. Round lights, much like the one in that blue ceiling.

 

Memory came like whiplash.

 

“Where are you going?” Crawford called after him as Schuldig strode to the staircase.

 

“I need to check something.” Hand on the railing, two steps at a time. He did not turn although he knew Crawford followed him. The American caught up to him at the door.

 

“I don’t think leaving now is a good idea, Schu. Farfarello could be back any minute.”

 

“You speak of him as though you’re afraid of him.” Schuldig did not smile at the flash of annoyance that lit Crawford’s eyes for a moment. “He won’t come back so soon.”

 

“How do you know that?”

 

“I have a feeling I know where he is.” He opened the front door and stepped onto the sidewalk after a glance down both sides of the street. “And I need to talk to him alone.”

 

**January 22 nd, 2002, Tokyo**

**1323 Hours**

 

The district Dogenzaka lies north of the Expressway No 3 Shibuyasen railroad that cuts through Tokyo’s south like a great vein. Schuldig directed the cab driver to Shibuya Station and halfway there realized the left side of his head looked as though someone had taken a baseball bat to him. His jacket and shirt collar were stained with dried blood. Muddling the cab driver’s thoughts took only a second. Making him think Schuldig had already paid him another.

 

From Shibuya Station, he walked westwards, the railroad tracks of the Shibuyasen line to his left, a train rattling past him every two minutes.

 

Schwarz’s old apartment lay in a block of abandoned buildings at Dogenzaka’s west end, which was closest to the railroad tracks. He passed several signs that announced the abandoned buildings would soon be demolished and new apartment blocks built – Tokyo, as most metropolises, was a city where housing was hard to find and rent could take up a hardworking man’s entire monthly salary. Although Reiji Takatori had given them space in the Takatori Tower when they had worked for him, they had rented an apartment in Dogenzaka to have a safe place to plan and direct the finer points of those plans.

 

He found the ugly three-story building without trouble. The windows on the first two floors were boarded up and the main entrance door was padlocked, but he did not bother with it and went to the back of the building. Farfarello’s Jeep was parked beneath a forlorn pine tree someone had planted in a small bed of green at the corner of the building, a desperate attempt to add a splash of life to this otherwise bleak location. A sign had been nailed to the tree, announcing that the city had plans for this building. Plans that, Schuldig bet, did not involve the tree.

 

The fire emergency door of the building was only leaned shut. Schuldig drew one of his guns and cocked it while he was still outside, remembering the staircase had been particularly prone to carry sounds. Inside, a stench of mildew and rot greeted him. Dust was dancing in the light that fell through the cracks in the boarded windows. The staircase was littered with bottles, old newspapers and a few dead birds. No smell of urine of feces. Farfarello must have had set a few examples on hapless homeless people to keep the place as relatively clean as it was; cockroaches scuttled away from the carcass of a bird as he reached the landing of the first floor. Safe from an infestation by humans, but those little buggers did not seem to bother the Irishman. There was a large, Italy-shaped stain of old, dried blood on the ground.

 

He passed doors, all of them open, all rooms behind them empty. At the end of the hallway on the first floor, one door stood open a little more than the others did. As he approached it, he heard the murmurs of a transistor radio – meaning there was still electricity in the abandoned house. Interesting.

 

The old Schwarz hideout had moderately large rooms: a kitchen, a bathroom, a short hallway and a living room, plus a room for every one of them. Schuldig now stood in that hallway, the cocked gun held at his side, pointed to the floor. Devoid of furniture, the rooms he passed – the kitchen, the living room, Crawford’s, Nagi’s and his room – appeared larger to him than they had before. There was a fine coating of dust on the single table that stood at the end of the hallway. A thick electrical cord wound itself from the kitchen along the hallway to what had been Farfarello’s old room like a black snake waiting to strike. Schuldig carefully stepped over the cord, without preamble walked through the door to Farfarello’s room, and aimed his gun at Farfarello’s brow as the Irishman swiveled around in the office chair that stood in front of a large desk beneath the single, small window.

 

“Hello.” Schuldig said nonchalantly.

 

Farfarello seemed genuinely surprised, but he caught himself quickly. “Hi.”

 

The desk behind Farfarello was littered with computer equipment and a small transistor radio. Books were stacked on one end of the desk, an array of post-it notes were stuck on their spines. Pens, notebooks, city maps on the other end of the desk. A bottle of orange juice next to the keyboard, the cap nearby. Empty take-out cartons in a wastebasket next to the desk.

 

“Nice little hole you dug yourself here, Far.” He stepped further into the room and kept the gun aimed at the Irishman, who sat motionlessly. Farfarello’s single eye followed his moves as a cat’s eye will follow the mouse. “I’m surprised they didn’t cut the power yet.”

 

“I own the building,” came the toneless answer. “The city’s been trying to buy it from me for half a year now.”

 

“Yeah, you just bought it, didn’t you? Nice sum of money you got on the side. How much do you have, twenty million? Fifty?”

 

“How did you find me?”

 

Farfarello did not seem to be carrying a weapon, but not seeing one did not mean there was none. Schuldig knew he was at a disadvantage anyway, but as long as Farfarello was willing to play along, he would keep the gun up. Would he be able to drop it if Farfarello told - commanded – him to point it at his own head and pull the trigger? Schuldig was willing to find out, if it came to it.

 

“Followed a hunch.” He glanced at the ceiling. Blue, just as the memory flash had shown him, blue as it had been in his dream within a dream. They had had it painted blue at Farfarello’s request when they moved him into what would be his room for years. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

 

“Aww, Schu…do you trust me that little?” A hint of maliciousness crept into Farfarello’s voice, but he did not move, just stared at the telepath.

 

Schuldig did not rise to the taunt. “I’m going to ask a few questions, and you’re going to answer them. And if I so much as think you’re lying to me, I won’t hesitate to put a few holes into you.”

 

“Is that a threat?” A snort. “Come on, Schu. I can make you drop that gun before you can so much as begin to pull the trigger. There’s ten feet of uncluttered floor between us. How many times do you think you can pull the trigger before I’ve crossed those ten feet and ripped your throat out?”

 

“Humor me. Daiki Nakamura. Who was he, and why did you kill him?”

 

“I told you. Small mob boss from Kyoto trying to gain new ground here.”

 

He lowered the gun and pulled the trigger. The gunshot seemed very loud in the room, but louder still was the sound of the bullet hitting the computer screen accompanied by a spray of blood. The impact of the bullet rocked Farfarello, but the Irishman kept his hands on the armrests of the office chair and did not look at the wound in his right shoulder, slightly above the spot where the Russian had shot him earlier. A fine tendril of smoke rose from the frayed edges of the bullet hole where his shirt was singed.

 

“Try again,” Schuldig said.

 

Farfarello’s golden eye turned into a flat yellow disk with a tiny point of black in the middle. Schuldig half-expected his fingers to lose control over the gun, but then Farfarello suddenly laughed hollowly and looked to the side.

 

“You had Nagi trace my money.” A statement, not a question. “I should’ve thought about that. Very well then, if you insist. Daiki Nakamura led an international smuggling ring. They rerouted cargo crates from their original route and used the old Tsukiji Fish Market as a holding spot from which the merchandise was to be delivered to the new ‘owners’.”

 

“I know that much. Tell me everything.”

 

“He paid me two million American Dollars to make sure the merchandise didn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

 

“And you killed him. Two million Dollars just to make sure a bunch of crates full with steel and platinum wiring don’t get stolen, that’s a lot of money for such worthless crap.”

 

“He was paid 15 Million to intercept the crates and an additional two million to pay me.” Farfarello turned his head the other way and robbed Schuldig of seeing his eye, presenting him with the eye patch instead. “There were no wires in those crates.”

 

“But Nakamura -”

 

“– thought there were, yes. The crates contained something far more valuable, well, to some people at least. Files. Old files, to be exact.”

 

Schuldig blinked slowly as puzzle pieces reverted themselves again and slid into different slots in the patchwork of his mind.

 

He said, “Eszet files. Eszet used Nakamura to intercept the crates in case any opposing forces within Eszet would try to get a hold of them on their way from Europe to Tokyo.”

 

Farfarello nodded. “Yes. Nakamura had made himself a name in his field of work, and Eszet only works with the best. They dangled an insane sum of money in front of his nose and ordered him to hire me. I was supposed to dispose of Nakamura and hand the crates over to the Eszet agents who’re already here. The shipment that arrived this morning was the last one. The whole thing was a setup.”

 

“But you killed the Eszet agents. They were Gifted. The one I shot was Gifted, at least.”

 

A soft, dry chuckle, and Farfarello turned his head back around. Schuldig’s gut reaction was to take a step back at the venom he saw, but he stopped himself from moving at the last moment. A drop of sweat rolled down on the side of Farfarello’s face and shivered on the edge of his jaw before it fell and was soaked up by his shirt. When the Irishman spoke again, it was in a voice Schuldig had never before heard him use. Cold, emotionless, flat, dead, and so utterly calm it was nerve-wracking.

 

“Do you in all honesty believe I’d _ever_ work with Eszet, Schu?”

 

“You take their money,” Schuldig retorted. “I’d call that working with them. You killed Weyland.”

 

“Weyland? Bah!” Farfarello grimaced. “He was in the way. Weyland was a fool. Weyland thought he could lead his ridiculous rebellion against Eszet with that handful of people he had. They’re all dead now, anyway. That stupid idea was nipped in the bud before Weyland was even on the way here. And yes, I was also ordered to kill Weyland.”

 

Schuldig slowly shook his head. “I don’t know what I should be more amazed at, your scheming skills or my own stupidity. If you hadn’t lied to me about the situation at the fish market this morning, I’d still believe all that bullshit you told us.”

 

Farfarello only smiled.

 

“Let’s go on. I’m not sure you’re not lying to me now, too, but at least the story you’re telling me makes more sense than what I’ve heard so far. Terry Garfield. Got anything to tell me about him?”

 

“Terry Garfield is dead.”

 

“Is he? I’m not so sure.”

 

“Crawford shot him.” Farfarello’s smile widened. “Garfield was the assassin who came to kill Crawford in New York. I got news of his death before you and Crawford knocked on my door six days ago. Originally, I had intended to kill Garfield when he came here, but since Crawford did the job for me, I had to delegate the honor of dying in his stead to someone else.”

 

“Another Eszet agent,” Schuldig guessed.

 

Farfarello nodded. “Yes. There are plenty of them here. Weyland didn’t know Terry Garfield. He’d never seen him. They had conditioned Weyland so completely, he would have reacted to any dead person the way he did. All I had to make sure was that he killed himself in front of your eyes, and that, might I say, worked out pretty well indeed.”

 

The tone of voice Farfarello was using now grated on Schuldig’s ego like a chainsaw on soft skin. He had to admit he was impressed by the audacious planning Farfarello had put into his scheme, as much as he was impressed by the cold-bloodedness with which Farfarello had been – and still was, no doubt – pulling the strings.

 

But how far did those strings extend? For all the questions Farfarello had answered, Schuldig was still not sure what role Schwarz as a whole and Farfarello in particular were playing in the entire plan. He made an ushering motion with the gun.

 

“Tell me everything.”

 

“Won’t you have a seat first? You must be getting tired standing there all the time.”

 

“What’re you talking about, I’m not -”

 

His legs felt tired from one second to the next. Suddenly in panic, Schuldig shifted his aim from Farfarello’s shoulder to Farfarello’s sternum and pulled the trigger again - only Farfarello was not where he had been a second ago anymore, and Schuldig’s shot blasted a hole through the back of the office chair before he was swept off his feet and thrown into the wall next to the door. The gun clattered to the ground, his fingers suddenly stiff. He gave a short bark of pain as Farfarello’s entire weight pressed him against the wall, felt his ribs shift. Pain where the back of his head had hit the wall added to the pounding in his left temple. He yanked his knee up into Farfarello’s stomach, but an arm blocked his leg, and then his legs were giving out under him as though cut off. He lost all feeling below the waist and experienced another sudden burst of panic.

 

“NO!”

 

“Sssh…” Farfarello’s hand clamped down on his mouth and Farfarello’s leg slid between his, holding him upright. His face was suddenly very close to Schuldig’s, and his breath moved warmly over Schuldig’s cheek. “Save your breath. You’ll need it.”

 

In his terror, Schuldig unleashed a mental attack against the Irishman that would have killed any other human being on the spot.

 

How do telepaths attack? They gather what they hear and roll it into a single, precisely aimed thought they send to someone else with so much ferocity, one of Schuldig’s teachers in Rosenkreuz had likened it to using a tank to kill a mouse. In human beings, the attack has the same effect of sticking your finger into a 20,000 Volt outlet. The brain, unable to comprehend and compute so much input at once, overloads and sends all the wrong signals to the vital organs and functions of the body, commanding the heart to beat faster, the lungs to draw more breath. Most noticeably, it commands the adrenal gland to produce an insane amount of adrenaline. Its effects are simple: it increases the rate and strength of the heartbeat, enforces a dilation of the bronchi and the pupils, triggers vasoconstriction, sweating and reduced clotting time of the blood. The blood flow is concentrated on the organs and drawn back from the skin.

 

In short: a human being under a telepathic attack will literally explode. Adrenaline causes the blood vessels to contract. The blood vessels in the brain will be the first to burst, causing the bizarre effect of blood pouring from all orifices of the face. The liver will explode under the quantities of blood pumped through it; the attacked person will bleed out from within.

 

None of this applied to Farfarello.

 

All of this applied to Schuldig, who in his panic and due to the loss of his gun had used the next best thing as a weapon: his mind. In retrospect, he knew he should have known better. He felt the backlash of his psychic attack like a kick to the stomach and gasped for breath, feeling his heart jump and beat out of rhythm from one moment to the next. Blindly, he tried to erect shields around the core of his being; in the few seconds that passed between him attacking Farfarello and being slapped in the face by his own power, his entire body stiffened and muscle cramps racked him. He bit his tongue, tasted the metallic tang of blood and gurgled in the back of his throat, recalling, stupidly, the first time this had happened: back in this very same cell, seven years ago, but back then, he had been prepared for the backlash.

 

This time, he was not, and he had to fight to dissipate the force of his own attack and lessen the pressure on his mental shields.

 

Then the pressure was gone, and he fell into a white void. Gasping, his body racked by shudders, he slid to the floor, or tried to. The feeling in his hands returned. He reached up and wrapped his fingers around Farfarello’s wrists, yanking the hands away from his temples.

 

“Stop!” Schuldig managed to gurgle out. “Don’t do that.”

 

The whispering voices returned, cradling him in their familiarity. He took a deep breath and let his head sink forward, for the moment careless of the fact that his brow was resting against Farfarello’s collarbones. Farfarello’s leg was still between his; Schuldig was nearly sitting on that leg, not trusting his own to hold him.

 

“Don’t do that,” he repeated. He did not know if he kept his hands wrapped around Farfarello’s wrists to keep Farfarello from touching his head again or to have something to hold on to and ground himself.

 

They finally slid to the floor together, and Schuldig ended up straddling Farfarello’s lap, glad for the solidity of the wall behind him and the body beneath his. All thoughts about Eszet evaporated for now, Schuldig concentrated on breathing slowly and steadily, every lungful returning more and more control over his muscles back to him.

 

“I would give you all the silence of the world,” Farfarello whispered close to Schuldig’s ear, “If only you asked me for it.”

 

Schuldig, eyes closed and nose buried in Farfarello’s shirt, did not answer. Could not answer. He remembered all the times he had spoken of how he hated the voices in his head, those incessant whispers that haunted him into the very dreams he had at night and never allowed him a private thought without the feeling of the entire world being witness to that thought accompanying it. Remembered how he had wished for complete and utter silence. Two times now, that silence had been shown to him, and both times, it had left him terrified and feeling stripped naked. He hated them, he cursed them at times, but the thoughts of other people were as much a part of him as his own blood. He knew he could not live without either.

 

_Then how_ , a small part of him asked, _can you stand being near him? He is the silence you want and dread. He is the void._

 

Schuldig had no answer to that and chose not to listen anymore. No more whispers came from Farfarello, and that was fine with him, too. He waited until he had his heaving stomach back under control and then leaned back, head against the wall behind him, dragging Farfarello's hands up onto his thighs and keeping his own around Farfarello’s wrists. He regarded the Irishman through eyes narrowed to slits. Farfarello was staring at a spot on Schuldig’s chest.

 

“You lied to me,” Schuldig said. Doubt and uncertainty were wiped from his mind; no human being could whisper as Farfarello just had and lie. For the first time in days, Schuldig felt he was standing on steady ground and not swimming in a sea of guesses and ‘what ifs’. “You lied to me when you said you don’t love me.”

 

Farfarello lifted his head and gave Schuldig an even, calm glance. “Does it matter?”

 

“Does anything matter?”

 

Farfarello frowned. “Does it make a difference?”

 

“Does it make a difference to you?”

 

The frown deepened and Farfarello looked away again. He seemed angry – with himself, Schuldig guessed. No, not guessed. _Knew_. The telepath gave a soft sigh and looked at the window in the wall behind Farfarello. When he spoke, he spoke to the window.

 

“You don’t have to answer. I know it does. I didn’t lie when I said I don’t love you. I don’t. At least not in the textbook way of pink hearts and holding hands. I don’t know if what I feel for you is love, but I know I would have shot anyone else who lied to me for six days straight and then attacked me with a sharp object.”

 

Farfarello snorted, but to Schuldig it sounded suspiciously as though he was trying to mask laughter. The telepath thought that he had made an error in what he had said. Not six days straight. More like ten years, give and take a few. He still did not know if Farfarello’s insanity had been truth or show. He thought about adding it, to see if Farfarello would finally give him an answer he could believe, but then did not. What difference did it make? It was bad enough their old ‘employer’ was coming after them; he did not need more things from the past to come back and haunt him.

 

He let go of Farfarello’s wrists and placed his hands on either side of Farfarello’s head as the Irishman looked back at him. There was no resistance as Schuldig pulled him closer to rest his brow against Farfarello’s. Unsteady ground again, but Schuldig thought he could glimpse the stepping-stones in the quicksand. There were not many, but they would have to do.

 

\---

 

“All right, I give up.” Crawford threw his gun onto the counter of the bar and sat down heavily. “Just shoot me now.”

 

Schuldig let out a breath he had not realized he was holding and lowered his own gun to a less threatening place at his side. Next to him, Farfarello stood with his arms crossed over his chest, contemptuously glaring at Crawford. Nagi, at the foot of the stairs, just hung onto the railing, flabbergasted. Schuldig was not surprised as the Japanese let go of the railing and plopped down on the first step much in the same manner Crawford had plopped down on the bar stool.

 

Reading no imminent hostile emotions from Crawford, only a lot of surprise and annoyance at being surprised, Schuldig flipped the safety back on his SIG-Sauer and slipped the gun back into its holster.

 

Farfarello did not move. Crawford did not move. Nagi did not move. Schuldig sighed and placed himself between Farfarello and Crawford, his back leaned against the counter. Although he still felt slightly sick from the backlash of his own mental attack against Farfarello, he broadened his receptive range until he had more than a surface awareness of what was going on inside Crawford and Nagi’s minds.

 

“Far?” he urged, hoping the Irishman would comply and not _mope_ at having been threatened by Crawford.

 

Farfarello sent Crawford another scorching glare and placed his hands on his hips, looking at the scuffed toes of his boots.

 

“The Elders will arrive here in a week from now. They’ll come by ship, through Tokyo Harbor. They’ll bring the entire ruling corps with them – everyone who has something to say in Eszet now will be on that ship. That will be our chance to get rid of them once and for all.”

 

Silence. Crawford’s head slowly came up, brows lowered over eyes so dark they were nearly black. He looked at Schuldig, who nodded silently, and then rose from the chair, his eyes fixed on Farfarello.

 

“You know that?” Crawford’s voice rose in volume at the last word; from Crawford’s mind, Schuldig received the impression of waves crashing against a black shore with more and more force. He readied himself to intervene should the American try and attack Farfarello. Throwing himself at Crawford was still better than giving Farfarello a chance to use his Gift on Crawford, or worse yet, not use his Gift and attack Crawford with his bare hands.

 

“I’ve known it for nearly half a year now,” Farfarello said evenly. “Hear me out before you start frothing at the mouth.”

 

“Give me _one_ reason why I should believe anything that comes from your mouth, you rat!” Crawford shouted. “You knew it? And you didn’t tell us?”

 

“I’ve had my reasons.”

 

“Oh? And what reasons would that be?”

 

Farfarello’s lips drew back from his teeth in a sneer. “Your incapability, for one.”

 

Crawford snapped for air and clamped his hands around the edge of the counter. Undaunted, Farfarello went on,

 

“I’ve planned for the day when the Elders arrive here for nearly three years now. I will not let you ruin my plans, and you would ruin them, because you, Crawford, have the aggravating habit of thinking things will work better your way.”

 

Crawford throwing himself at Farfarello? Yes? No? Another snap for air. No. While Crawford was concentrated on the Irishman, Schuldig slowly reached for Crawford’s gun and slipped it out of reach behind the counter. He caught Nagi’s eyes across the bar and tried a reassuring smile, which was not reciprocated. Wincing, Schuldig realized Farfarello had just done what Nagi had made a condition: he would only believe Farfarello worked for Eszet when he heard it from Farfarello himself. Yet, Nagi remained remarkably calm. Schuldig took that as a good sign.

 

“I did start out as a hired killer for the Yakuza and whoever else needed my service,” Farfarello said. “I don’t know how much Schu told you two about what I told him, but I basically told the truth except for one thing: Eszet never showed up in our old hideout. The death of the original Elders had hit them hard enough. When the Lazarus Temple crashed, about half of all Eszet members died. The power struggles for the position of Elder began almost immediately afterward. About a year after you had left, I received my first contract from overseas. Through an alias, of course.”

 

Crawford was listening intently now, Schuldig could see. This part of Farfarello’s story had fascinated him as well when he had listened to it the first time, still in Schwarz’s old hideout.

 

“They were careful. You might say we as Schwarz had gotten ourselves quite a reputation. I had killed fifteen people for them when the first open contact happened. I was paid to intercept a shipment of drugs that turned out to be rather useless Eszet files, and the entire thing was so lamely done, I knew I was supposed to find out. They wanted my reaction, and they got it.” Farfarello shrugged. “We made a bargain. They don’t piss on my tree, I don’t piss on theirs. Of course, this will only hold as long as they’re still located in Europe. I expect they will try to get rid of me as soon as they’ve settled down here. I can pull too many strings.”

 

This was something Farfarello had not mentioned before. Schuldig had observed him among his people a few times now - but how many people really did work for the Irishman? Who were they? Schuldig doubted Farfarello really had that much to do with the Yakuza – he was not Japanese for one, and the Yakuza had always been a clan-oriented group. His methods of work had to be far too flashy for them. When Farfarello killed someone, you could be sure to read about it in the next newspaper.

 

“Why you?” Nagi asked. He had come closer during Farfarello’s monologue and now stood slightly behind Crawford, head cocked to the side. “There are plenty of people in Tokyo who could do the same work you do.”

 

“No,” Farfarello answered, “there aren’t. At least none of influence.”

 

“How do you mean?” Crawford frowned. “Eszet knew you as a certified psychopath. Why would they trust someone who killed one of the original Elders?”

 

“Because they don’t know about it,” Schuldig said in Farfarello’s stead.

 

Farfarello nodded and went on, “Only the four of us know what really happened in the Lazarus Temple. The only other person who did know about it was Omi Tsukiyono. He’s the only one of Weiss who remained in Tokyo, and he’s sure not going to talk to anyone anymore.”

 

“Where are the rest of Weiß?” Nagi asked.

 

“They have been taken care of,” Farfarello said, and left it at that. None of them needed to ask what it meant.

 

“Someone else knows what happened, too,” Crawford said quietly. He was gazing at Farfarello as though he was trying to pierce him with a stare, trying to catch him in a lie. “Manx.”

 

“Ah, Manx,” Farfarello chuckled softly. “Manx plays a rather minor role in all this.”

 

“Explain.”

 

“Crawford, what do you think the power structure in Tokyo is?” Farfarello began to move, wandering slowly toward the dance floor, his back turned to them. Schuldig observed how the long, white hair loosely swung with the movement and felt an itch to bury his hands in it. “The few politicians who aren’t corrupt have no power over those who are. Any political movement in this city is funded with money that’s everything else but clean. And nobody cares, because that’s the way it works, and it works rather well, don’t you think?”

 

“Get to the point. I don’t need a lecture in politics, Far; I’ve worked behind the scene for years.”

 

“Why do you think Manx sits in the chair of chief of police?” The Irishman stopped at the edge of the dance floor. “She has backup from several party leaders, and guess who backs _them_ up? Given the fact that she was almost second in command of Kritiker, she knows what’s going on in Tokyo well enough. Her applying for that position was a rather lucky break for me – and a handful of other people who aren’t too keen on the idea of having something like Eszet here. At even the slightest mention of ‘Eszet’, she goes off like a bloodhound. I throw her a bone once in a while. She’s especially keen on party leaders who’re suddenly backed by unknown overseas sources. Some of her people even have a term for it: ‘Do the Takatori.’ That’s how I managed to keep Eszet from getting another foothold in the politic scenery here so far. Political pressure doesn’t do much good, but bad publicity does wonders.”

 

Schuldig blinked. He had not known that. He and Crawford had talked to Manx, and there had not been the slightest evidence of her even being aware of any movement on Eszet’s part. He made a mental note to ask Farfarello about it later. Again, he asked himself how far the Irishman’s powers did extend. There had been no trace of Farfarello in Manx’s mind as he monitored her during the conversation at the precinct. Did Biokinesis allow control over someone’s mind as well as of someone’s body?

 

The thought was slightly disconcerting. Mind and matter, Schuldig knew, were separable, and yet they were not. Nevertheless, it seemed that Farfarello could influence someone’s mind through their body as well as Schuldig could influence someone’s body through their mind. Or was there another Gift, something Farfarello had not mentioned yet? He thought about the shields – and they had to be shields – Farfarello had erected around Schuldig’s mind several times now, about the shield that prevented Schuldig from reading the Irishman’s mind. Manx _had_ to know about Farfarello’s presence in Tokyo.

 

Crawford and Nagi were as baffled as Schuldig. He shrugged at their questioning stares and asked,

 

“How do we figure in it all?”

 

Farfarello had answered him the question before, but Schuldig wanted him to repeat it for Crawford and Nagi. He wanted them to hear it from the Irishman himself.

 

“Not at all.” Farfarello turned and gave Schuldig a slightly annoyed glance. On their drive back to the Seventh Serpent, Farfarello had asked Schuldig to explain the situation with Schwarz to them, and he was apparently not happy that Schuldig had changed his mind in the last minute. “To be quite honest, you are the kink in my plan.”

 

“Well, thank you,” Nagi said dryly. He shook his head and sneered. “And here I thought you’d be happy to see us.”

 

The biting sarcasm was unmistakable, but Farfarello shrugged it off. “The way you disappeared meant to me I’d never see you again. I had to very quickly change a lot of things I had planned for months.” He glanced at Schuldig. “A lot of things…”

 

Schuldig blew him a kiss and received the finger in return. “Love you too, Far.”

 

“Please,” Crawford cut in. “Spare me the details.” He sounded tired.

 

Farfarello remained where he was and silently watched Crawford and Nagi. Schuldig knew they had to reach an understanding now and here, otherwise it would be too late – both for Farfarello’s planning, and for what Crawford had had in mind. Their plans were not very different, yet the telepath thought Farfarello’s was better, simply because it had been in the making for longer. He did not doubt what Farfarello had said about being able to pulling strings, either. The idea of readily available backup sounded promising, if nothing else.

 

“Why do you want to get rid of them in the first place, Far?” Crawford asked after a minute of silence had passed. “Let’s pretend you didn’t think Eszet would try and assassinate you as soon as you’d helped them establish themselves here.”

 

“I’d still kill them all,” came the reply. “This is my city, this is my hunting ground. I don’t care about the Yakuza, I don’t care about all the smalltime gangers and gangster, but I dislike the idea of an organization like Eszet being here.”

 

“What about us?”

 

Farfarello gave an exasperated sigh and shook his head. “When will it finally get into your head that if I wanted you dead, you’d be dead now? I haven’t exactly been short of opportunities to kill all of you.”

 

Crawford looked at Schuldig, who returned the glance with a non-committal shrug. The American had to make his mind up by himself; Schuldig had made his choice. Whether or not it was a sign of a strong will or lack thereof that he had so abruptly changed his mind about Farfarello within less than 24 hours, whether or not it meant losing the support of Nagi and Crawford, he would stay and work with Farfarello. Everything else seemed like a bad choice right now. He could always change his mind again. Schuldig was nothing if not flexible in his view of things.

 

“All right,” Crawford said finally and sighed. “All right. Tell me about that plan of yours.”

 

“January 30th is the day they’ll arrive here. They’ll come by ship. Their plan is to make the Takatori Tower their stronghold. That’s why I killed Tsukiyono.” Farfarello glanced at the loft and then at Schuldig. “I was supposed to retrieve the Lazarus Stone for them. I have no idea what they want with it, and I don’t care. It’s not going to end up in their hands, anyway.”

 

“I’ve been trying to find information about the stone,” Nagi said. “So far, Zippo. Just ordinary stuff.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” Farfarello insisted. “They won’t get the stone. The moment they’ll set foot on Japanese soil, they’re dead.”

 

\---

 

“And we all sit here holding our dicks.” Schuldig blew a strand of hair out of his eyes and leaned against the wall next to the door to the kitchen. “And look menacingly. While you and your trusty pack of wolves take care of Eszet.”

 

“You can help if you want to. They’re bringing their elite, and none of my men is immune to Gifted.”

 

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. How many people work for you?”

 

“Enough.”

 

“Give me a number.”

 

A sigh. “Last time I counted my flock they were 73 men and two women.”

 

Schuldig drew a face and looked at the toes of his shoes. Seventy-five people against what Farfarello had termed the ‘elite’ of Eszet were 75 lambs lined up in front of the butcher’s block. He looked up and watched Farfarello fill water into the coffee maker until the Irishman set the pitcher of water down on the kitchen counter, heaved another sigh, and returned the stare.

 

“Lambs to the slaughter, I know.” He flipped the lid of the coffee maker shut and switched it on.

 

“Do they know what they’re heading toward?”

 

“Yes. That’s why the plan is to meet Eszet in the harbor and kill them there before they have a chance to settle down.”

 

“What about the Eszet agents who’re already here? They’ll be at the harbor too.”

 

“Not if they’re dead before the Elders arrive here.” Farfarello leaned on the counter and stared at a bottle of vegetable oil standing next to the coffee maker. “They’re already on sea. Communications have been far and between, the risk that something’s intercepted is too great. When the Elders arrive here, there will be no one left in Tokyo who’s in any way capable of helping them.”

 

“You’re awfully confident your plan will work.” Schuldig turned his head and wandered to the other end of the counter, inspecting a row of glasses lined up against the wall. “Suppose someone squeals. Suppose one of your ‘flock’ is paid to stab you in the back.”

 

“That’s a risk I have to take.”

 

“Suppose they capture you.”

 

“I’ll kill myself before that happens. I can direct my lungs to stop breathing, force my heart to stop beating, and they can’t do jack about it if I decide to do so.”

 

“So ready to give up your life?”

 

“I will not be held in a cage again,” Farfarello said, his tone of voice leaving no room for doubt. “We have one shot at this, and if we fuck it up, that was it, no second chances. I doubt they’d let me live, anyway.”

 

Nor anyone else who fought on the Irishman’s side, Schuldig knew. The seriousness of their situation had not yet fully caught up with him, and he was aware of that. He did not know if it was a safety switch of his own mind that prevented him from worrying about what was to come, or if it was true unconcern. From his predator’s point of view, an ungifted human being was no threat to him unless he was careless enough to let something happen. Gifted were a direr threat, but Schuldig knew he was one of the best telepaths out there, and thus met even the idea of having to fight against Gifted with a certain arrogance.

 

“What happens after?”

 

Farfarello retrieved two cups from a cupboard above the counter. “What do you mean?”

 

“Well, let’s say we’re lucky enough to survive, are we going to marry and adopt a few poor homeless children and raise them in the country?”

 

Farfarello nearly dropped the cups, and Schuldig burst out laughing. The expression on the Irishman’s face was priceless! It was a mixture of fascinated horror and pure disgust. He winked at the frown that followed and then imagined Farfarello holding a baby, and burst out laughing right again.

 

“Glad you’re so amused,” Farfarello muttered. He demonstratively turned his back and, from the sound of it, drummed his fingers on the counter as he waited for the coffee maker to finish bubbling.

 

“Aww, come on.” Schuldig suppressed another case of the giggles and stretched languidly. “The idea’s as good as any.”

 

“Yeah, right.”

 

Schuldig stepped close to Farfarello’s side and, pretending he was not even thinking about it, slipped one of his hands into the back pocket of Farfarello’s pants. It left his arm lying across Farfarello’s back and his hand cupping one half of Farfarello’s ass rather snugly. His entire side was touching the Irishman’s from shoulder to hip.

 

Farfarello turned his head to the side and looked at him out of the corner of his eye, remarking in a low, calm voice,

 

“You’re not one of those touchy-feely guys, are you?”

 

Schuldig turned his head as well and leaned into him until his lips were brushing Farfarello’s ear. As he had expected it, Farfarello slightly moved his head, anticipating Schuldig was going to whisper something to him. Instead, the telepath languidly traced the shell of Farfarello’s ear with the tip of his tongue. The shudder that went through Farfarello’s body made him grin; with a gentle tug on Farfarello’s earlobe with his teeth, Schuldig leaned back again.

 

“Bet your ass on that.”

 

The Irishman snorted, but it turned into a chuckle. He returned his attention to what he had been doing and finished pouring two mugs of coffee. Through the half-open door, Schuldig could see parts of the stairs leading up into the loft, where Crawford and Nagi had settled down for a few hours of precious sleep.

 

They both had taken the revelations rather well, Schuldig thought as he watched Farfarello stir sugar into the cups. It did not mean things had gone back to normal – far from it. A gap had been created between Nagi, Crawford and Farfarello, a gap Schuldig was not so sure would ever fully close again. Especially Nagi had taken the breach in his trust hard. Both Nagi and Crawford saw the necessity out of which Farfarello had acted, but the mind was fickle and sometimes harbored grudges over things that were minor in comparison to other things. Hell, Schuldig himself was still smarting over some of the things Farfarello had done.

 

He propped his chin up on the Irishman’s shoulder and looked at his hand where it was stuck in Farfarello’s pocket. Farfarello’s hair hung around his wrist, heavy, soft, and white; he pulled his hand out of the pocket and slipped it beneath the fall of hair to grasp Farfarello’s shirt and pull it out of the waistband of his pants. The skin in the small of Farfarello’s back was soft and seemed warmer than skin was supposed to be. Schuldig moved his fingertips along the indentations of the spine and up, tracing the vertebrae until he reached the nape of Farfarello’s neck. He touched the exit wound of the gunshot and found soft skin there as well, and this patch of skin was even warmer than down in the small of Farfarello’s back.

 

Farfarello held still during the curious examination, his hands spread on top of the counter. Schuldig could only see the eye patch, but he had the feeling that Farfarello’s eye was closed, that Farfarello was imagining the path his fingers were taking. He stepped behind the Irishman and slipped his other hand beneath the shirt as well, mirroring the movements of his first. Farfarello rewarded him with a barely audible purr.

 

“Take your shirt off,” Schuldig said. “And get your hair out of the way.”

 

The Irishman complied without a word. The shirt dropped to the counter, and he dragged his hair forward over one shoulder before he returned into his original position, sighing softly. The sigh quickly turned into a sharp hiss as Schuldig dragged his fingernails from the backs of Farfarello’s shoulders down to the small of his back, leaving raised welts in their wake. Where new skin covered the exit wound of the gunshot, dots of red welled up in the welt that crossed it, and Schuldig watched one of those dots as it grew in size until it rolled down Farfarello’s back, a red line against ivory skin. He bent his knees and caught the drop before it reached the waistband of Farfarello’s pants and licked it away, upward, until he could close his mouth over its well and suckle on it. Farfarello’s back undulated slowly, the movement not unlike that of a snake coiled up in the sun. Schuldig fitted his groin against Farfarello’s ass, pressing the Irishman’s hips forward against the edge of the counter. His mouth still closed on the tiny bleeding wound, he moved his hands to Farfarello’s chest and traced the contours of his pectorals, thinking that despite the softness of the skin, there wasn’t really anything ‘soft’ about the Irishman. Not even his nipples, pebbled as he reached them, small hard nubs between his fingers. The piercings, small silver studs with a ball on each end, felt warm against his fingertips.

 

He sucked on the wound until it gave no more, finding the skin unblemished when he looked at it, though wet and suffused with blood. He felt a slight pang of frustration at that, though why, he could not determine. Although he did not want to injure the Irishman, he wanted to leave a mark, something that would stay. Perhaps it was a silly notion, but seeing that the welts on Farfarello’s back had faded to nothing as well only reinforced it. He moved his hands to the front of Farfarello’s waistband and encountered the solidity of a knife sheath.

 

Farfarello’s muscles tensed as Schuldig drew the knife, but otherwise he remained perfectly silent. The blade, though small, seemed sharp enough to split a hair; short and curved like a hawk’s talon, its keen edge and polished surface reflecting the overhead light, the blade was no more than two inches long and reminded Schuldig of a can opener more than a knife.

 

He set the needle-fine tip against Farfarello’s right shoulder blade and hesitated. Farfarello had stilled completely. Schuldig slipped his left arm across his abdomen and cupped a hipbone, wondering who he was trying to steady – himself or the Irishman? Around the tip of the knife, blood was welling up again. He began to cut, the knife parting the skin as easily as warm butter. Soon the right side of Farfarello’s back was awash in red, and Schuldig felt it seep through the cloth of his shirt where it pressed against Farfarello’s skin.

 

When he was done, he felt silly and exhilarated at the same time. He kept his left arm where it was and set the knife down on the counter, finding the buckle to Farfarello’s belt with both hands, unbuckling, unbuttoning, unzipping. The Irishman grunted softly as Schuldig shoved his pants down to around his thighs, the first sound he had uttered since Schuldig had left the scratches on his back.

 

“Make them stay,” Schuldig whispered roughly, eyes glued to the bleeding lines. “Make them stay.”

 

Farfarello nodded.

 

The tepid air in the kitchen felt unnaturally cold to the skin of his cock as he unbuckled his own belt and dropped his pants, but not for long. He did not know and did not care where Farfarello had gotten the oil from as he twisted around at the waist and grasped Schuldig’s cock in both hands, slicking the telepath’s length from root to tip with quick, precise movements that left Schuldig breathless. He heard the dull clinking of porcelain as the coffee mugs were shoved out of the way, the liquid splash of coffee against the counter. But Schuldig couldn’t look away from the blood and the edges of the wound that seemed like obscenely red mouths to him, opening and closing with the muscles moving beneath Farfarello’s skin as the Irishman bent forward over the counter and rested on his elbows. He pressed Farfarello’s legs apart, gritted his teeth at the heat and the tightness, and regretted the position that didn’t allow him to penetrate him as deeply as he would have liked; but he could see the lines on Farfarello’s back and that was, right now, more important to the telepath.

 

Some when along the way to orgasm, his mind allowed Schuldig a single, clear thought amidst the haziness of sex: that he would never fully own Farfarello, would never fully understand him and never fully be sure of his own motives toward him. However, as most men destroy that which they cannot own, he instead had left a mark on the Irishman, something that would stay as long as anything between them mattered. Farfarello had allowed it, and that, Schuldig felt, said it all.

 

Spent, he slumped over Farfarello’s back and felt his pulse thundering in his ears. His fingers were clamped around Farfarello’s hips, and this time he did not need to wonder if he was holding the Irishman to himself or holding himself to the Irishman. He lifted his head, his gaze falling on and passing over the bottle of vegetable oil that stood next to the coffee maker on the counter. He traced the still-bleeding lines on Farfarello’s back with the tip of his tongue. Mine, they said.

 

 

**January 22 nd, 2002, Tokyo**

**1940 Hours**

 

“Don’t do that.”

 

“It gets in my way.”

 

“It didn’t get in your way for five years, why now?”

 

“It didn’t get in my way for five years because I was killing only halfwits and wannabes.”

 

“And that’s not the case anymore? Since when are you afraid of Eszet halfwits and wannabes?”

 

“Schuldig. This is my hair we’re talking about, and I can damn well do with it what I want. And would you please stop pouting? You look like a baby with indigestion.”

 

“You always looked as though someone had gone at you with a pair of Piranhas instead of a pair of clippers. I was always wondering if you cut it yourself. Sure looked like it.”

 

Poignant silence.

 

“There. You see my point?”

 

“I can’t believe we’re having this discussion.”

 

“Then don’t cut it off and we won’t have this discussion anymore.”

 

Farfarello dropped the scissors into the sink and groaned. Schuldig used the opportunity to cross the bathroom and get a hold of said scissors before the Irishman had a chance to change his mind. He could not help the smug grin that stretched his lips to their limit as it seemed he had won their – admittedly rather inane and pointless – discussion. He dropped the scissors onto the floor and kicked them into a corner of the bathroom.

 

“There, that didn’t hurt, did it?”

 

“Your point is?”

 

The long, white hair was soft beneath his fingers as he gathered it up in both hands. “I wanted to do this ever since I saw you with long hair.”

 

Farfarello’s eyebrow quirked but he remained otherwise silent as Schuldig combed his fingers through his hair in long, slow moves. They had painstakingly quietly made their way up into the loft after the derailed attempt at coffee, and after a shower now were simply passing the time until Crawford and Nagi woke back up. Schuldig had brought his suitcase into the bedroom and felt quite comfortable in old Jeans and t-shirt, while Farfarello did not seem to be able to draw breath without leather pants. It was an odd observation, but Schuldig knew the mind was more likely to notice little things like that, if one spent more time thinking about the object those little things were in connection with. Another of those odd observations was Farfarello’s earrings. He thought he could remember seeing him with four in each ear. Now, there were nine in each ear.

 

“You _are_ one of those touchy-feely guys,” Farfarello said with conviction.

 

“Do you mind?” He buried his nose in two handfuls of hair. It was still damp from the shower and smelled of water and soap. “Things you can touch are real. Everything else is an illusion.”

 

Farfarello did not respond, and Schuldig was glad. The last thing he wanted to talk about now were philosophic views of the world. He was content to be where he was and knew he could enjoy it as long as it lasted – never mind Eszet’s looming shadow on the horizon of the confined world he was moving in. It was a common trait in the human character to guess at what the future might bring and spoil the good moments with those guesses. Encountering a mind living in the Now as he did was a seldom occasion.

 

He took a step back and combed through Farfarello’s hair with his fingers, parting it into three roughly equal coils, and proceeded to braid it. Left over middle under right over middle under left and an elastic band Farfarello handed him securing it. Satisfied with the result of his effort, he gave the Irishman a pat on the butt and smirked at him in the mirror.

 

“I’d love to meet your father. You obviously got your colors from him.”

 

“I was thinking the same when I saw my mother.” Farfarello turned away from the sink and left the bathroom, his arms raised above his head in a huge stretch. “What about you?”

 

“Mix of both. Mom’s eyes and dad’s hair.” Schuldig switched the light out in the bathroom as he followed Farfarello. “You got any siblings?”

 

“I had a stepsister.”

 

“Had?”

 

“I killed her.”

 

“Oh.” Schuldig sat down on the bed and folded his legs beneath him. The revelation that Farfarello had killed his sister did not disturb him; rather, he was interested in how and when it had happened. Whether or not Farfarello had been insane, the telepath knew little about his past. He remembered his surprise at Crawford’s words five years ago, as he had told him they had to leave and get Farfarello out of a precarious situation. This ‘precarious situation’ had quickly turned into a cozy little intermezzo with Weiß, who showed up exactly as Crawford had predicted it.

 

Back then, Farfarello had offhandedly mentioned that the woman Schuldig had seen in the old church on the outskirts of Tokyo had been his mother Ruth. His then very dead mother Ruth. That Farfarello himself had killed her had only cemented Schuldig’s opinion that the Irishman was quite mad, worse maybe than they had always thought. What exactly had passed between mother and son, Schuldig had never learned. He had later tried gleaning information about what had happened from the minds of the two Weiß members who had been in the church with Farfarello and Ruth, but their memory had been sketchy and twisted.

 

“Reminiscing?”

 

He looked up and realized he had been woolgathering. Farfarello sat on the raised edge of the bed, his arms folded on his knees, and looked at him. Schuldig nodded, and then said,

 

“When we got you out of the asylum, your evaluation sheet said something about repressed memory. How much of your past do you truly remember?”

 

Farfarello raised an eyebrow and pursed his mouth. “Enough.”

 

“Then tell me what happened. How did you end up in that asylum in the first place?”

 

“There isn’t much to tell.” Farfarello sighed. “Woman meets man, woman gets pregnant, woman realizes she rather wants to be a nun and gives baby up for adoption, baby is adopted and grows up with a stepsister and mom and dad. Then the nun realizes giving up her child isn’t as easy as she thought it would be, so she tries to make up for giving him up in the first place by sticking around. She becomes some kind of teacher for the kid through a Catholic playgroup and one day decides to tell her son the truth. The son snaps, kills his stepsister, mom and dad with a kitchen knife and tries to kill his real mother as well, but she survives. She’s too much in love with her child to give him up to the police, so she doesn’t. Instead, she takes him to another city, a large city, and leaves him with people she thinks will take good care of him. The son grows up and gets to know the wrong people; he kills a few, learns he likes it, and finally is caught and put into an asylum for the criminally insane. End of story.”

 

Schuldig frowned. “And the son, was he ever really insane, or did he just like killing too much after he had had a taste of blood?”

 

The smile on Farfarello’s lips sent a shiver down his spine. “It’s a point of view, nothing more.”

 

“Come on, give me a straight answer.”

 

“Why? Afraid I’ll snap and cut your throat all of a sudden after quoting memorable phrases from the Bible?”

 

“No, but I’m curious.”

 

“Freedom comes in many forms, Schu, and not necessarily the forms we’re used to.” Farfarello slipped onto the mattress and reclined on his side. “I’m the Cheshire Cat, never giving a straight answer. Once people have a fixed opinion about you, you’re free to do whatever you want to because people are stoic mules who never change their mind once they’re fixed on something.”

 

“Are you insane, or are you not insane?” Schuldig moved closer to Farfarello and pushed him over onto his back. He rested his crossed arms on Farfarello’s chest and propped his chin up on them, studying Farfarello’s face. The underside of Farfarello’s chin was unblemished; the skin looked very tender there. He remembered the first days after the fall of the Lazarus Temple, when Farfarello had not been able to speak due to an injury. One of the Weiß assassins had caught the Irishman beneath the chin with five razor-sharp claws. The idea of something piercing the underside of his chin and puncturing the roof of his mouth made Schuldig’s gut churn with queasiness. Yet, Farfarello was not even bearing scars from that encounter.

 

A long moment of silence passed before Farfarello finally answered. “I am when I want to be.”

 

The answer was good enough for Schuldig, although it had not been a real answer.

 

\---

 

Close to midnight, they met in the main room of the loft. Take-out from McDonald’s helped calm down growling stomachs; Schuldig quietly snickered at Crawford and Farfarello bickering about why there was no real food in the Seventh Serpent’s kitchen. It could have been worse – they could have been arguing about the sense behind Farfarello’s planning, or the role the rest of them were going to play. Because as it was, Farfarello was still against them having any role in those plans.

 

“Okay, for the tenth time – why not?”

 

Farfarello, mouth open to take a bite out of a hamburger, dropped it onto the greasy paper spread out in place of a napkin and sighed. Schuldig glanced up from his meal and imagined how the air between Farfarello on one side of the table and Crawford on the other side would charge itself with electricity and start shooting miniature lightning flashes. Unable to read Farfarello’s thoughts, he concentrated on Crawford’s – finding, to his delight, the American ready to try to convince Farfarello with reason and not brute strength. Schuldig himself had no intention to sit tight and wait for Farfarello to do whatever he was planning, but the telepath felt this point were better discussed in private, and not with Nagi and Crawford present. He felt he had gained certain privileges. Farfarello had already mentioned to him – earlier in the kitchen - that his help was welcome.

 

“Because I don’t need your backup. Everything is planned.”

 

“You can never have too many people,” Crawford responded not a heartbeat later.

 

They seemed settled down comfortably for an argument. Schuldig winked at Nagi and received rolled eyes in answer. He guessed Nagi had been witness to too many similar arguments between Crawford and Schuldig in the heyday of Schwarz to value the entertainment factor.

 

“Too many people will fuck things up.”

 

“None of your people is Gifted, Far.”

 

“Look, why do you want to risk your life?”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean? Are you implying I’m afraid?”

 

“I’m just surprised by your sudden interest in getting your hands dirty. You can just sit back and enjoy the show, and,” Farfarello’s voice turned vicious, “if I fuck it up you can play knight in shining armor and come rescue me or finish them off.”

 

Crawford sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “No. They killed the people who meant most to me on this forsaken planet. I will not sit back and watch.”

 

“Neither will I,” Nagi announced. He picked up a fry and studied it before he dumped it back into its paper container. “And unless you plan on using your Gift on me, Far, I will do my part. I always wanted to know how my powers fare against something like a ship.”

 

Farfarello sent Schuldig a pained glance, but the telepath merely shrugged and continued eating. This was Farfarello’s decision, not his. He doubted, overall, that it really was as much Farfarello’s decision as the Irishman might think – neither Crawford nor Nagi had to listen to anything Farfarello told them. Unless Farfarello really planned to use his Gift to prevent them from doing anything, Schuldig did not see how else things were going to work.

 

“Look,” Crawford said into the leaden silence. “One week till that ship arrives. You’re most likely planning to assassinate the Eszet agents already in Tokyo before that happens. And you’re most likely planning to do it by yourself, because I don’t think you really trust your people’s skills all that much.”

 

Farfarello did not respond, and Crawford went on,

 

“I’m not saying we have to reenact Schwarz. When I met Schu in Venice, I told him I’d need his help, not his undying loyalty. We’re well beyond that stage. But you will not find anyone better than us, Far. And you know that.”

 

“Don’t tell me what I know or don’t know,” Farfarello muttered. “Don’t assume _anything_ about me, Crawford.”

 

The sudden change in tension – as well as topic, it seemed – alerted Schuldig. Crawford tensed as much as Farfarello did, face expressionless. Schuldig remembered how five years ago Farfarello had undermined Crawford’s authority again and again simply by disappearing or going off on his own during missions. He had thought the behavior childish back then and had not paid a lot of attention to it; Farfarello had been of interest to him when they were out on assignments together. Crawford, on the other hand, had exploded repeatedly when Farfarello suddenly disappeared during or after an assignment. He had been responsible for the Irishman when it came to explain things to Eszet. He had been responsible for all of their actions, and while Schuldig had taken a tongue-lashing from Crawford lightly, it seemed Farfarello had not.

 

He rose and walked over to Farfarello, aware of Crawford and Nagi’s eyes on him. Once there, Schuldig suddenly was at a loss – what was he supposed to do? Bend down and give him a hug and a kiss and tell him it would be okay, he only needed to relax and everything would be fine? The way Farfarello’s shoulders tensed as Schuldig stopped behind him, he had the suspicion Farfarello would turn around and deck him if he tried. Why had he gotten up in the first place? Settling for a less injury-prone action, he placed his hand on Farfarello’s shoulder and squeezed. He missed the advantages of mental conversation with Farfarello, and there was no way he would try to persuade him of anything in front of Crawford and Nagi. These things, Schuldig felt, should be confined to between them alone.

 

Farfarello turned his head and glanced up at him as though he did not know what to make of the hand on his shoulder. Schuldig realized neither of them was familiar with the subtleties in a relationship extending beyond professional male-to-male bonding. And there it was again, that silly feeling he had had when he cut the word ‘mine’ into Farfarello’s back. Part curiosity, part uneasiness, part affection, and Schuldig could see a road perforated with pitfalls for both of them. Experiencing someone else’s relationship problems through mental contact did not make for sufficient experience for one’s own. Not knowing what else to do, he gave Farfarello’s shoulder another squeeze and hoped it would convey the things he could not say.

 

“Perhaps you two should go for a walk,” Crawford suggested dryly as neither Schuldig nor Farfarello said anything.

 

“Yeah, and leave us a list with the names of those agents,” Nagi added.

 

Farfarello turned back around. Schuldig leveled an annoyed glare at Crawford, but did not take his hand away from Farfarello’s shoulder.

 

“Sylvia Lin [5],” Farfarello said, “Anthony Perkins, Andrea Scarlatti, Lena Olberg, Daniel Tyson, Yuuya Yamasaki, Takumi Ogawa, Hikaru Abe and a handful of bodyguards and lackeys.” He glanced at Nagi. “Do you need a list of where they work and reside?”

 

Nagi’s fingers were already flying over the keyboard of his laptop. “Nope.”

 

“Good.” Farfarello rose and turned, catching Schuldig’s hand as it slid off his shoulder. “We’re going for a walk.”

 

\---

 

It was cold enough for Schuldig’s breath to form a white cloud of condensation. He shoved his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and sniffed, looking down the street. Despite the late hour, Tokyo was still noisy enough for his heartbeat to take on the rhythm of a Techno beat as they walked past the invitingly open door of a disco.

 

“Did you bring your guns?”

 

The questions threw him off. Schuldig stopped on the sidewalk and blinked at Farfarello’s back as the Irishman walked on for a couple of steps and then turned around, eyebrows inquisitively raised.

 

“Yeah. Why?”

 

“We’re going to pay someone a visit. Rather, I am going to pay several someones a visit, it’s up to you if you want to come along or not.”

 

He had a sudden image of Crawford, red-faced, angry, hands around Farfarello’s throat. While the image did have its merits, Schuldig was not sure if what Farfarello was planning was that good an idea. He caught up to the Irishman and shook his head at him.

 

“Crawford’s going to have a cow, Far.”

 

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Farfarello’s grin nearly split his face. “Just like in the old days, no?”

 

“The old days are dead and gone.” Schuldig caught Farfarello’s elbow as the other man turned down the sidewalk, and stopped him. “Crawford needs something to vent his frustration on. Yeah, I guess you’re seeing this all as your chance to get back at Eszet _and_ Crawford, but what we don’t need is fighting among ourselves. And if I’m guessing right, what you’re planning to do will lead to that.”

 

The grin slipped and made way for a tight mask. Farfarello was clearly disappointed in Schuldig’s refusal, but the telepath did not relent. Nor did he let go as Farfarello tried to yank his arm out of Schuldig’s grip. A group of drunken tourists coming down the sidewalk toward them stopped a few feet away. Schuldig could hear their insecurity and curiosity in what seemed to be the beginning of a fight and mentally urged them to cross the street and not pay any more attention to them. He stepped closer to Farfarello and hoped he would not start pushing. The last thing he wanted was to land on his ass.

 

“Listen,” Schuldig said softly. He reached for Farfarello’s other arm, feeling the muscles tight and trembling beneath his fingers. “When we’re done with all this, I don’t care of you kill Crawford or tuck a dead rat down his pants or whatever. You’ve had things your way. Give a little.”

 

“You’re turning into Mother Theresa,” Farfarello growled, as-softly. “Look at you, concerned for Crawford? That’s a novelty.”

 

He gave a sharp yank on Farfarello’s arms, angry and annoyed. “Stop behaving like a little boy who didn’t get what he wants. It’s boring and tiring, especially if it comes from you.”

 

“Then why don’t you _leave_?” The last word a louder growl, and Farfarello did push at Schuldig, hard enough to make the telepath stumble. He lost his grip on Farfarello’s arms as the Irishman yanked backwards, and nearly collided with a young couple who came out of the door to a restaurant. Schuldig did not stop to apologize but bared his teeth in a snarl and jogged after Farfarello, who had turned and was walking away.

 

Any warm feeling toward Farfarello was buried under an avalanche of anger and annoyance at his behavior. If the Irishman were a woman, right now he would make the perfect bitchy diva in a soap opera. What _was_ his problem? He could not honestly have been expecting Schuldig to say yes and amen to everything he decided.

 

“I hate relationships, especially mine,” Schuldig muttered under his breath as he finally caught up with Farfarello. He reached out and tried to grab his arm, but Farfarello wound his arm free and continued down the sidewalk at a quicker pace. “Would you fucking _stop_ -”

 

He reached out again, and made a mistake. He got hold of the braid hanging down Farfarello’s back and, in his anger, wound it twice around his hand and pulled on it. Schuldig knew it was a mistake the moment Farfarello’s head jerked back, but the reaction came so quickly, he could only let it happen. Farfarello whirled around on his heel, Schuldig saw the light of the streetlamps reflect off the blade that suddenly appeared between them, and then the pull on the hair he held lessened and the braided hair fanned out into loose strands just as the remaining length of hair unraveled around Farfarello’s head.

 

“- running away.”

 

They both blinked at the same time. Farfarello stared at the loose coil of hair Schuldig held, then at the knife in his hand, still raised where he had sawed through his own hair. Schuldig was staring at the knife, too – asking himself that if he had grabbed for Farfarello’s arm instead, would his hand now by lying on the sidewalk between them? He dropped the hair and stepped forward, pushing against Farfarello’s chest with both hands.

 

“Are you out of your mind? You could’ve cut my arm off!”

 

Now it was Farfarello’s turn to stumble backwards, but he steadied himself quickly. He seemed perplexed by what he had done and remained silent. Schuldig pushed him again, and when that still did not gain him a reaction other than a stare, kicked at Farfarello’s stomach. Satisfied to hear Farfarello gasp for breath and see him hunch over, Schuldig huffed and raised his hand to crack his fist down on the back of Farfarello’s head.

 

Only that, as before in Schwarz’s old apartment, Farfarello was not where he had been a moment ago. He hit empty air and felt his feet leave the ground as Farfarello impacted with his middle, automatically grabbing for Farfarello’s shoulders as he lost his balance in mid-air. His back connected sharply with a wall; feeling the air leave his lungs in a loud gasping cough, Schuldig gritted his teeth and dug his fingers into Farfarello’s shoulders as he waited for an opening to yank his knee up for the Irishman’s crotch. Pain or no pain, no man willingly took blows to the gonads without showing _some_ reaction.

 

Then Farfarello’s mouth was on his in an aggressive kiss. Schuldig bit him, startled, instantly tasting the sharp copper of blood on his own tongue as the soft skin of Farfarello’s lower lip gave under his teeth. He waited for another blow, for Farfarello to subdue him with his Gift, but as the seconds ticked by Schuldig realized Farfarello was only holding him – up against the wall, Schuldig’s feet dangling a few inches above the ground. As abruptly as things had escalated, they now calmed down again. Schuldig felt Farfarello’s heartbeat against his chest and opened his eyes to find Farfarello’s closed and his face relaxed. His own fingers had stopped digging into Farfarello’s shoulders somewhere between then and now. He sighed through his nose, turned the kiss into something explorative, and gentle, ignoring the catcalls and wolf whistles coming from a group of Japanese somewhere to their left.

 

At length, Farfarello let him down, but he did not step back or end the kiss. The Irishman’s hands slipped around Schuldig’s back and wound into Schuldig’s hair – was he still holding that knife? Schuldig leaned back and trapped Farfarello’s hands between his back and the wall. Did he trust him? No. Definitely not. He had not trusted the Farfarello he had known five years ago, and the Farfarello he knew now was even more unpredictable. Schuldig knew it was part of the attraction, yet he was not willing to turn thrills into life threatening dangers. It irked him that he could not know what it was that attracted Farfarello to him unless he asked him, and Schuldig knew he would rather die than give himself away so easily. Instant gratification and ego stroking came in many forms, but he favored the subtle methods. None of which worked on the Irishman unless he caught him talking in his sleep.

 

With a sigh, Farfarello slid his mouth along Schuldig’s jaw and buried his face in the crook of Schuldig’s shoulder and neck. He did not speak, and Schuldig did not know what to say, either, guessing that if there _was_ something to say, one of them would take the initiative. Silence was fine with him, too. He tipped his head forward and rested his cheek against the side of Farfarello’s head, watching two Japanese men from the group who had whistled pick up the hair Schuldig had dropped and make off with it. He had to grin at the idea of what they might do with it and stifled a burst of laughter at the image of Farfarello’s hair hanging on a wall like some kind of trophy. He slipped his hands under Farfarello’s arms and up into the now considerably shorter hair. It reached to between his shoulder blades.

 

“At least now I can have it cut short,” Farfarello muttered into Schuldig’s neck.

 

Schuldig chuckled and pushed them away from the wall, taking a step back from the Irishman to look at him. The hair had been slightly damp when he braided it, and now retained a wavy form that looked simply odd on Farfarello. Schuldig was reminded of Youji Kudou, one of the Weiß assassins, who had had wavy hair. It had looked good on him; on Farfarello, it looked…odd. He nodded emphatically.

 

“And I get to watch. No piranhas, okay?”

 

“Hadn’t planned on it. So. Now that you’ve thwarted my plans for tonight, and seeing that Crawford needs to let off steam, I’m bored.”

 

“Well, I guess Nagi and Crawford are right now canvassing the net for information about those people you named them.” Schuldig searched his pockets for a pack of cigarettes and lit one. His eyes slid over the street and came to rest on a two Japanese businessmen leaving a bar near the far street corner. He watched them trying to flag down a taxi and felt the corners of his mouth rise in a malicious grin. Following the lightning flash of an idea, he asked, “When was the last time you hunted?”

 

Farfarello followed his line of view and began to smile. “Too long ago.”

 

\---

 

Fear so brilliant and pure it tasted like a heavy red wine that had just the right temperature was what Schuldig would call the telepaths’ drug of choice. Contrary to the widespread belief among Gifted that telepaths and empaths were unnecessarily cruel and thrived on other people’s misery, it was not the fear in someone’s eyes or the frightened heartbeat in their chest that drove Schuldig to ‘hunt’ humanity. It were the high peaks amid the boring melee of everyday thought. He had no interest in bleeding wounds as long as he could listen to the agony of a mind knowing it was going to die. Thoughts took on flavors rarely found in everyday life. Of course, there was the risk the teachers at Rosenkreuz had warned him and every other telepath about: listen to death long enough and it will take you down as well.

 

While that might have been true for telepaths who had not worked the line as Schuldig had, he knew when it became dangerous. The trick was to pull back before that danger became addicting and seductive. When he knew it was there, when he knew to anticipate it, he could deal with it.

 

Sweat had broken out along his hairline. Farfarello and he had chased one of the two businessmen all the way from Ginza to the seedier parts of Roppongi, making sure to steer the frightened man clear of tourists and bars. This, too, was part of the attraction – the knowledge that anytime, someone could step out of a bar and rescue their unwilling victim. The rush that came every time this almost happened and Schuldig had to disengage a part of himself from their victim’s mind to eradicate the presence of three people from someone else’s perception was as thrilling as the hunt itself. It was a test of his abilities as much as an indulgence. It was cruel, but Schuldig likened it to people who hunted wild animals for fun. Humanity might long since have surpassed the stage of wild animals, yet in Schuldig’s mind that did not make them untouchable. He could have the cheap thrills anytime he wanted. But he had to work to get something as pure as the fear of death.

 

He turned a corner and ran through the dark and trash-littered mouth of an unevenly paved alley, eyes fixed on the back of the Japanese running a good twenty feet in front of him. The man was in good shape – that was why they had picked him and not his slightly obese partner – and held his own easily as far as running away was concerned. But the hunt was slowly ending, and Schuldig glanced up briefly as a shadow passed on the ground before him to see Farfarello clear the ditch between two rooftops and land somewhere out of sight. All windows facing the street were dark and shuttered, and even if someone saw them…that was part of the thrill, too. He gained speed and saw the Japanese stop abruptly as Farfarello jumped down from a rooftop, landing with a nearly soundless thud on the pavement in front of the man. Arms flailing, Schuldig did not see the silver arc of Farfarello’s blade as it flashed out, but he heard it in the muffled, agonized moan squeezed out of burning lungs as the man stumbled backwards and fell.

 

Schuldig caught him before he hit the ground. Back to chest, the dark head thrashing against his chest as the telepath quickly clasped his hands in the back of the Japanese’s neck, the man uttered a wordless sound of terror and kicked out at the Irishman as Farfarello rose from his crouched position and walked forward. Farfarello easily caught the foot and twisted, then slid his arm along the man’s leg until he could hook his elbow under his knee to hold the limb up. The knife he held in his hand was the same Schuldig had used on Farfarello’s back. Schuldig glanced down at the Japanese’s front and saw the light shirt soaked with blood that in this light was black. He caught Farfarello’s glance and held it for a moment.

 

“Now?”

 

Just like in the old days. Schuldig nodded wordlessly and braced himself. He closed his eyes and _listened_. He did not hear the sickening slide of metal through skin or the suddenly high-pitched screams that ended in gurgling. He did not smell the overwhelming odor of blood or the visceral stench as Farfarello cut through intestines. His body balanced itself as the man in his arms began to thrash wildly.

 

He _listened_. To pain, to fear, to a hailstorm of dying thoughts, bright like new snow, odorless but tasting of things he could not name. To a scream that rose inside his mind until it reached that one single note opera singers hunger after, that nameless color a painter seeks for his entire life. There were no single thoughts, no red line for him to follow, only a great coil of everything the man was – everything that was going to fade soon – cumulating into pure fear and agony. It was like a river current he was wading through, too strong to fight against it and not really willing to fight because what lay at the end of that river was seductively dark and enticing. Schuldig reached out and thought he could brush death with his fingertips. Not the real death, not the weakening moans of the man in his arms, but the phantom death lingering on the edges of reality. And when it started to fade, he pulled back reluctantly and left the current of the river, feeling it suck at him as though it did not want to let him go, feeling an iron tension leave his entire body and a tingling on his skin, telling him: it might have been you. But it wasn’t you. Be happy.

 

When all was done, he dropped the corpse to the ground without another glance and stepped away from it. The entire act had taken no more than 15 seconds, yet to him the effects of their hunt would remain as a pleasant feeling for hours. He walked into the shadows beneath a dirty shop awning and leaned against the wall, letting the experience linger while he watched Farfarello clean the knife and tuck it away. When the Irishman joined him beneath the awning, Schuldig chuckled dryly.

 

“Maybe the old days aren’t as dead and gone as I said.”

 

Farfarello answered with a lazy smile. As Schuldig remembered it, killing someone left Farfarello relaxed and calm. Though he lately had not been sure about many things concerning him, Schuldig knew Farfarello’s sadism could be sated, and for now, it was. Whatever fuelled those urges had lain its head down for now and was snoozing with a small grin of satisfaction on its lips.

 

Quickly but not hurriedly, they walked away from the site of their killing and took several turns until they reached the crossing between the Roppongi-dori and the Gaien-Higashi-dori, which by some people was considered Tokyo’s infernal center of late-night entertainment. It was not until he took a beer from a waitress in a small, cozy bar that Schuldig realized the arms of his jacket were spattered with small dots of by now dried blood. Halfway through with his glass, both he and Farfarello briefly glanced at the door as the sound of sirens cut through the distant but audible Techno beats coming from the ‘Almond’, one of Tokyo’s largest dance clubs nearby. They shared a small smile and continued hanging after their personal thoughts. The small alcove they sat in gave them as much privacy as possible in the cramped quarters of the bar. No one noticed or paid any attention to Farfarello as he slipped a different knife out of a sheath at the small of his back and started cutting away at his hair.

 

“I thought you agreed to no piranhas?” Schuldig asked after watching him for a minute.

 

“I’m not gonna walk around with Kudou hair,” Farfarello muttered.

 

So they had both made the same association. Schuldig smiled and reached for the knife, patting the bank next to him with his other hand. Reluctantly, Farfarello handed the knife over and moved around the table.

 

“At least I can see what I’m cutting off,” Schuldig explained. The scurrility of the situation was not lost on him, but he did not mind. A quick sweep of the occupants of the tables and the bar revealed only mild interest and a few amused thoughts. “We should go back to your bar and see what Crawford and Nagi are doing.”

 

“Can’t you contact him mentally or call? I don’t really want to see Crawford right now.”

 

The pile of cut off strands on the table next to Schuldig’s glass grew steadily. “What is it between you and Crawford, anyway?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Why do you hate him so much?”

 

“I don’t hate him. I just don’t like him.”

 

“Yeah, but why?”

 

Farfarello sighed. “I don’t know. You ever met someone and disliked them from the start just because of what he was and how he acted?”

 

“Yeah. That’s what you’re feeling for Crawford?”

 

“Pretty much. I don’t hate him enough to want to kill him, but I’m not thrilled about his company, either.”

 

They fell silent after that. When at last the unruly strands of Farfarello’s hair were tamed, Schuldig handed the knife back and looked at his handiwork with a critical eye. If before Farfarello had looked like a character from a computer game – Schuldig had trouble remembering the name, but he remembered Nagi had been crazy about it a few years ago - now he looked like a punk. The white hair stood up in little tufts. He reached out and ruffled it, grinning at Farfarello’s sour face at the gesture.

 

“I remember you doing that five years ago…”

 

“What’s so bad about it? You’re ruffable.”

 

“Is that even a word?”

 

Schuldig rested his chin in his cupped hand and his elbow on the table. He studied Farfarello for a long moment, until the other began to get restless under the relentless stare. The telepath did not stop looking at his lover until said lover reached out and covered Schuldig’s eyes with his hand. Schuldig pulled the hand down and kissed the palm.

 

“You’re so…attached it’s not funny anymore.”

 

That stung a little, but Schuldig let it slip. He guessed Farfarello had as much trouble adjusting to their new situation as he did, and being blunt was better than holding back. If Farfarello started holding back, there would be nothing worth speaking about between them. He squeezed Farfarello’s hand and let go.

 

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about something.”

 

“You’ve been asking me a lot lately.”

 

“I know. Look at it as me learning who you really are.” Schuldig lit a cigarette.

 

“Well, ask then.”

 

“What do you see in me?”

 

Farfarello obviously had not been expecting this question. He looked at Schuldig, looked at his drink, and wrapped his hands around the glass as if he suddenly needed something to hold.

 

“Well?”

 

“You never change, that’s what I see in you. You’re stable.”

 

“I’m stable?” Incredulous, Schuldig blinked. “That’s what you see in me?”

 

“That’s what always…struck me about you. No matter what happened, you always stay the same. It’s something I admire, sort of.”

 

Leave it to someone like Farfarello to see something like a constantly unstable personality as stable. Schuldig found himself fascinated by the concept, if not flattered. He already knew Farfarello thought him to be beautiful, he did not need a verbal affirmation.

 

“And that’s all?”

 

Farfarello gave him an odd glance. “What do you mean, all?”

 

“All you see in me is my stable personality?”

 

“Of course not.”

 

“What else, then?”

 

“Does it bug you that much that you can’t know what I’m thinking about you, so you have to grill me?”

 

He nodded emphatically. “I’m a mind reader, Far. I need to know what people are thinking or I’m not happy.”

 

Farfarello snorted and raised his glass to his lips. “Funny. And here I was thinking you’d give anything for a bit of silence.”

 

The slightly sarcastic comment made Schuldig grin, but he could not help feeling another of those small stinging sensations that recently had become a familiar occurrence in his conversations with the Irishman. Perhaps they were a sign of true feeling, or perhaps it was the fact that of all people, Farfarello was one of few who always made their opinion about something known, and damn the consequences. Schuldig slipped closer and leaned against him, nuzzling Farfarello’s ear with his lips. He felt his companion shiver as he gently bit into the meaty part of the earlobe and worried it with his teeth, then traced the faint outlines of his bite with the tip of his tongue.

 

“You’re wondering why I don’t want you to silence my mind.”

 

Farfarello gave a barely perceivable nod and leaned into the touch, returning his drink to the table without sparing it a glance.

 

Schuldig tried for the best comparison that came to mind. “Imagine listening to a song all your life…and then someone pulls the plug and all that’s left is nothing. I thought I wanted it, but it got old pretty quick.”

 

He was whispering the words, no more than mouthing them. He slipped his hand onto Farfarello’s thigh and traced the skin-warm leather with his fingertips, circles, squares, drawing nearer and nearer to the Irishman’s crotch. Farfarello twisted at the waist, slowly, his arm that had been resting on the table coming up to wrap around the back of Schuldig’s neck and take a firm hold of the hair at the back of the telepath’s head. Lips’ sliding across skin and the kiss was born, heated but slow. Schuldig tilted his head and closed his eyes, tasting a residue of blood and alcohol in Farfarello’s mouth. His hand found its way between Farfarello’s legs and started a steady, slow rhythm of stroking and squeezing.

 

Farfarello’s other hand moved into his jacket, pressing against his ribs and stroking upward. Dimly, focused on what he was doing, Schuldig felt him rearrange the shoulder holster beneath his right arm, but he did not pay real attention to it.

 

Farfarello sucked Schuldig’s tongue into his mouth and carefully bit the tip. Then his hand in the back of Schuldig’s neck tightened, he pulled back from the kiss, and Schuldig found the Irishman’s crotch approaching his face at an alarmingly fast pace as the Irishman pulled him down by the neck. The gunshot was deafening. Schuldig needed a moment to register both the fact that he was buried face-first in Farfarello’s crotch and that Farfarello’s hand was around the SIG-Sauer beneath his right arm and shooting at someone through his jacket. The heavy thud of a body, followed by the breathless silence inside the bar, was enough confirmation to let him know that Bad Things were about to happen.

 

The silence’s answer was a hailstorm of bullets. Schuldig felt the world tip upside-down as he was pulled off the bench and roughly shoved beneath the table; and he would really have to talk to Farfarello about surprising moves and what appeared to become the equivalent of a bodyguard complex. It took him a moment to arrange his thoughts, moments he spent gazing at feet and legs running through his field of view from beneath the table. Automatically, Schuldig reached for the gun beneath his left arm, aimed at a pair of legs that came to close to the table, and fired, turning a knee into pulp. When the man whom the knee belonged to fell to the ground with a scream, Schuldig fired at his head and silenced him.

 

“Farfarello? Where the _fuck_ are you?”

 

More importantly, what the fuck was going on? He did not receive a verbal answer but a sound he knew could only come from the Irishman: the very familiar sound of steel through flesh and the liquid splash of blood meeting the ground. Schuldig crawled out from under the table and rolled out of the way, as a bleeding man tumbled to the ground right in front of him. Taking a quick mental stock of the circumstances, he darted toward the bar and leapt over it, twisting his ankle as he landed on the soft mass of a corpse behind the counter. He cursed, slid off the corpse and ran to the left end of the counter, eyes on the going-ons in the bar, ignoring the stings of pain up his leg.

 

“There he is!”

 

The shout got his attention and turned him away from trying to figure out where Farfarello had ended up. From across the room, a tall, black-clad stranger aimed a wicked-looking gun at him; Schuldig took cover behind the ancient cash register and heard the bullet impact with metal as it missed him. The police? Had they been careless on their hunt and let someone follow them? Aware of the possible distraction, he crouched low behind the counter and closed his eyes for a second, casting a thin veil of his awareness out over the people. He encountered confusion, pain, and determination.

 

Eszet? Schuldig could not get a clear impression, but whoever was out there was intend on killing both him and Farfarello. The bottles lined up in neat rows behind the bar exploded as bullets rained down on them. Schuldig pulled his mind back together and cursed as he realized that someone was using a machine gun inside the bar. He turned his face away and shielded his head with his arms as shards and various beverages rained down on him. Mentally counting to three, Schuldig shot up from behind the counter, gun aimed in front of him, firing a shot at the first person he saw that did not have white hair.

 

He barely escaped the volley of bullets coming from his left as he saw another man trying to sneak up to the left end of the counter, but felt satisfaction as he saw the person wielding the machine gun go down with a spray of blood painting the wall behind them across the room. Back against the counter, gun pointed to the ground between his legs, Schuldig stared up at the edge of the counter and tried to single out the attacker with his mind. From the screams coming from a little further away, he guessed Farfarello was still occupied.

 

The tip of the machine gun appeared in his line of vision. Schuldig reached up, forfeiting the attempt at getting the attacker mentally, and yanked down, forcing the aim of the machine gun away from himself. As the man’s surprised face appeared, Schuldig pressed his own gun under his chin and fired.

 

“Schuldig!”

 

Crawford?

 

Perplexed, Schuldig gripped the edge of the counter and pulled himself up, a stinging pain in his left ankle making him grit his teeth. He risked a glance around the damaged cash register and saw the Oracle standing left to the entrance door, gun in both hands, firing a shot at another black-clad man who was stumbling toward him. Nagi stood next to him, hands out in front of him, and while Schuldig watched a young woman in an expensive dress suit ran toward him, screaming something in a language the telepath did not understand. She was blasted off her feet and impacted with the far wall, her moan of pain lost in the shots and shouts. Schuldig looked to the right and saw Farfarello in a corner, the Irishman nothing more than a blur of motion amidst black suits.

 

Crawford appeared next to him, taking his arm in a painful grip. “We came as quickly as we could.”

 

“What the fuck is going on?” Schuldig let himself be pulled up and out from behind the bar. He tested his ankle, eyes fixed on Farfarello in the corner. The Irishman was bleeding from several wounds but held his own well enough for the telepath not to be concerned.

 

“You tell me.” Crawford’s voice was tight as he pulled Schuldig into a telekinetic shield Nagi had set up near the door. “Nagi and I were just about to leave the bar for Sylvia Lin’s apartment when I got a vision of you being attacked here.”

 

A scream of anger interrupted their conversation. Schuldig turned his head just in time to see Farfarello drop his knife and clamp both hands on either side of his head. There was no warning but Schuldig knew he was not the only one who felt the sudden accumulation of power inside the bar. It was like wet heat, pressing down his throat. Around Farfarello, the air tightened, shimmering with a million light particles for the barest of moments.

 

Schuldig had a second to acknowledge he was witnessing the second power that he had suspected the Irishman of having, before the world was dipped into white and moving people became moving shapes, before Nagi’s telekinetic shield seemed to be assaulted by a strong gust of wind, before he heard himself scream in a sudden bout of blinding fear. The men around Farfarello were blasted off their feet and moved away from the Irishman like dancers in a painfully perfect choreography, their bodies hanging suspended in midair like dolls on strings. Light, more blue in appearance than white, burst out from Farfarello’s still form and went right through those hanging dolls. Schuldig thought he could see phantom shapes behind the trapped men, shadows of their own bodies writhing in the grip of something older, stronger, and more vicious than them. Then the light wave inverted itself, and the phantom shapes were pulled back inside their bodies, pulled out of their bodies, migrating toward Farfarello in the center; as if watching things backwards in slow motion, Schuldig saw the phantom shapes touch Farfarello and melt into him.

 

The light faded. The bodies hanging suspended in the air dropped to the ground and lay still. As Schuldig took a breath he did not realize he had been holding in, Farfarello tipped forward and collapsed as well.

 

**January 23 rd, 2002, Tokyo**

**0734 Hours**

 

“We can’t stay here.”

 

Schuldig tiredly turned his head at the sound of Crawford’s voice and nodded. “I know.”

 

“If they managed to track you down to that bar, then it’ll be easy to track us down _here_. I’m amazed they haven’t yet.”

 

“Crawford, don’t tell me things I know.” He gave a sigh and shook his head.

 

The American moved into Farfarello’s bedroom at such a slow pace that Schuldig wondered if Crawford was expecting an attack from either him or the prone figure on the bed. He stopped at the edge of the bed and crouched down, hands hanging between his knees, and looked at Farfarello.

 

“Still not waking up?”

 

Schuldig shook his head. “No. He hasn’t even moved. If he weren’t breathing, I’d say he’s dead.”

 

“We have something to discuss.” Crawford rose and held his hand out to Schuldig, who took it reluctantly.

 

Although Farfarello was breathing, although the Irishman seemed fine, the telepath was nevertheless worried. They had returned to the Seventh Serpent hours ago after making a hasty getaway from the other bar. Crawford had carried Farfarello up into the loft and then left Schuldig alone with him, and for hours, Schuldig had watched Farfarello, waiting for the moment when his lover would wake up from his comatose state. That had not happened. Schuldig had undressed Farfarello and watched the bullet wounds in his chest and legs heal at an alarming rate, he had shook him, talked to him, but all to no avail. Farfarello remained motionless and silent.

 

Now Schuldig rose to the feeling of two conflicting emotions fighting for the upper hand. One was the surge of thankfulness at Crawford’s entrance into the deadly silent bedroom paired with the chance of getting out of here, if only for a few minutes; the other was the overwhelming want to stay where he was. Tired and wound up, Schuldig felt vulnerable, prone to assaults from without and within. His current state was not enough to make him admit to himself that he was indeed harboring something akin to love for the Irishman, but it was enough to make him want to curl around Farfarello and sink nails and teeth into him and not let go for a prolonged amount of time.

 

Such were the pitfalls of caring for someone, Schuldig thought as he left the bedroom together with Crawford and leaned the door shut behind him. The second one’s own life was not the foremost thought in one’s mind anymore, other things, more dangerous things, started to creep in. Dangerous because those things generally meant more trouble for oneself, dangerous because one did not only have to take care of one’s own but also of someone else’s safety and wellbeing. Having been raised to think of himself first and ‘nach mir die Sintflut’ [6], all of Schuldig’s assassin traits wound in terror at the thought.

 

In the main room of the loft, Nagi sat at the head of the long table, laptop open in front of him. He glanced up as Schuldig and Crawford walked over to him and shut the computer, stretching and yawning.

 

“Any idea who the guys who attacked us were?”

 

Nagi shook his head at Schuldig’s question and put his laptop away. “None. The police are as clueless as we are. Body count stagnates at 36, but they’re still finding corpses in the immediate surroundings.”

 

Schuldig sat down and made a sound in the back of his throat. The attack – like so many things lately – had come unexpected. He could not help the doubt that came crawling up, doubt that mostly centered around Farfarello and his behavior as of late. Although he thought things between him and the Irishman were clear, the possibility of Farfarello having directed this attack as a distraction from something else was there. Once again, Schuldig thought, he had not seen it coming, while Farfarello had been prepared for or at least expecting it.

 

“There is one weird fact,” Crawford said. “When we left, everyone in that bar was dead. And by that, I mean dead, not just not moving anymore. Now the police reports say that everyone in a 100-feet radius of the bar ‘died under mysterious circumstances’.”

 

“Farfarello.” Schuldig glanced at the Oracle.

 

Crawford nodded. “I think so. Did he ever mention anything to you about that Gift we saw him use?”

 

The telepath shook his head and sighed. “I was suspecting him of having more than one Gift. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have added up. He’s a Biokinetic, but that wouldn’t explain how he’s practically invisible to our powers. Especially Nagi’s.”

 

“Well…” Nagi sat up straight and folded his arms on the table. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a theory. If he were ‘invisible’ to every physical influence to his body, bullets wouldn’t hit him, he wouldn’t bleed, and if we spin that tale further, he wouldn’t age either.”

 

“Immortal,” Crawford said softly.

 

“In a way, yeah.” Nagi frowned. “I know it sounds a bit incredible, but what if he can somehow…absorb things?”

 

“How do you mean?”

 

“Schu says he can’t read his mind. You say you can’t See anything in relation to him. My own powers just seem to go straight through him, but that wouldn’t make sense because then things behind him or around him would move.” Nagi spread his fingers on the table, tapping invisible keys again as though writing out what he was thinking. “I’m not really sure, but what if he can somehow sense someone else’s Gift and absorb it? Or if it doesn’t matter which Gift he’s attacked with, and every psychic attack is seen as such and thwarted? We already know his body is practically invincible. What if nature decided to go all the way and made his mind invincible, too?”

 

What if there is one single being out there with the power to withstand almost any attack, someone who is invincible to telepaths, oracles and telekinetics? Someone who cannot feel pain, but who knows how to administer all the nuances of pain? What if you have been living under the same roof with that being for a long time, and never realized the potential?

 

What if someone had?

 

Schuldig glanced at the door to the bedroom. There was a grander design behind this all, he knew it. Which that was, he did not know, but intended to find out. Farfarello, Farfarello…everything seemed to revolve around Farfarello lately, and why, no one knew. The erstwhile crazy lunatic had become their focus point, the key to many things that had been happening ever since they had returned to Tokyo. Nagi’s theory had not yet explained what Farfarello had done to the people at the bar; from Schuldig’s point of view, it looked as though he had drained them. Vampire…no, too freaky to even consider. Drained them of what? Their life force? Their souls? Or had he simply killed them by doing something far more terrible to them?

 

His gaze fell on Crawford’s briefcase, which stood in a corner of the room beneath a chair. The Lazarus Stone had nearly been forgotten over the last days, its importance to them lost beneath an onslaught of fights, blood, and personal problems. That thing, Schuldig knew, did also play a leading role in what was to come; and again, which role remained yet to be seen. Lazarus…He who rose from the grave, resurrected by a cursed man.

 

Crawford sighed heavily. “It’s no use. We’ll be sitting here till next week trying to make sense of this. Let’s pack up and get a safe place.”

 

“Where will we go?” Nagi asked.

 

“I don’t know,” Crawford admitted. “A hotel is out of the question. Schu?”

 

The telepath had been listening to the conversation with half an ear. He blinked, looked at his teammates, and then snapped his fingers.

 

“I know just the place.”

 

\---

 

Farfarello regained consciousness on the drive to Schwarz’s old headquarters, but remained stationary and glassy-eyed until they reached the block of abandoned buildings at the west end of Dogenzaka. Schuldig, sitting next to the Irishman in the back of the car, studied his companion’s profile but did not speak, wondering what was going through that pale head. Farfarello had assumed the look that had earned him the nickname ‘Zombie’ five years ago, this barely ‘there’ behavior that had creeped all of Schwarz out occasionally. He was staring out of the window but did not seem to see the people and buildings passing by. When they stopped at a red light, Schuldig reached over and pulled him back to chest, stroking his palm over Farfarello’s lips at the softly uttered growl of reluctance. He rested his chin atop Farfarello’s head and locked his arms around his ribs.

 

“How do you feel?”

 

Farfarello kept staring out of the car window. “Tired.”

 

Out of the corner of his eye, Schuldig saw Crawford turn his head. He hoped the American would not start asking questions, would not say a word. Despite Farfarello’s quiet statement, Schuldig felt as though he was holding a fully charged battery in his arms. Minute tremors ran through the Irishman’s body as though he was flexing his muscles. Battery. He thought of the phantom shapes migrating toward Farfarello, how they had seemed to melt into him, and banished the thought from his mind. It led to possibilities he did not want to consider now.

 

Crawford gazed at Farfarello for a moment and turned back to face the street.

 

All four of them were quiet as they reached their old apartment block. Schuldig, who had already gone through the process of remembering the good and not so good times that had passed here, watched Crawford and Nagi stare up at the building with a mixture between loathing and gladness on their faces. He refrained from reading their minds, having no care to know what exactly they were thinking. It could not have been much different from what he had been thinking.

 

He left it to Crawford and Nagi to unload what little belongings they had brought from the trunk of the car and helped Farfarello up the stairs, ignoring the Irishman’s pointed remarks at being able to walk on his own. The room which held Farfarello’s ‘secret headquarters’ looked like it had when Schuldig had found him here. He sat Farfarello down in the chair in front of the desk and stared at the demolished computer and the equipment scattered over the table before he crouched down in front of the chair and looked up at him.

 

“It takes time,” Farfarello said softly. He let his head sink back and stared at the ceiling.

 

“What takes time?”

 

“Everything.” Farfarello sighed. His voice sounded brittle when he spoke. “But soon it’s going to be finished.”

 

He could only mean the impeding visit of the Eszet Elders. “And then what?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

Schuldig gripped Farfarello’s knees in both hands and shook him gently until he had the other man’s attention. “What did you do? What kind of Gift did you use?”

 

“I’m tired, Schu.”

 

“No, answer me.”

 

Farfarello’s eye began to drift shut. Schuldig could not get rid of the impression that he was doing it on purpose, that he was not as tired as he said, that he simply did not want to have the conversation. He felt a stab of anger at Farfarello’s behavior and rose.

 

“I wish you would talk to me, Far. It would make a lot of things a lot easier.”

 

“For you, or for me?”

 

“Does it matter?”

 

Schuldig did not wait for an answer and left the Irishman alone. In the hallway, he met Crawford and Nagi, who stood in the disturbed dust and seemed to be waiting for him. As he caught up to them, Nagi said,

 

“Never thought I’d set foot in here again.”

 

“We all did,” Crawford said matter-of-factly.

 

“Nope.” Schuldig strode past them to the door, hands in his pockets. “Not all of us.”

 

\---

 

His feet found their way to Roppongi without his command. The morning rush hour past, Tokyo’s streets were busy with housewives and children on the way to school; the skyscrapers had already swallowed their workers into their bellies and would not spit them out again until many hours later. Physically tired from yesterday’s ordeal, Schuldig knew he would have to get rest soon, yet his mind refused. Too wired, too caught up in emotional struggle, he spent the time mulling things over until he gazed up to discover that he, unerringly it seemed, had found his way back to the now demolished and shut down little bar.

 

He stopped at a bright yellow sign that declared the area as off-limits to locals and tourist alike, and carelessly stared at the police workers moving like ghosts in and out of the rundown houses surrounding the bar. They were the only living beings around him; the surviving inhabitants of the shabby area were either hiding behind drawn curtains or had left their accommodations in a hurry to seek shelter in other places, places where people did not die like flies in their sleep. Schuldig could feel the uneasiness that lay like a shroud over the houses within the restricted area. From his vantage point, he could not see the bar, could only sense that most of the police activity took place there.

 

He lifted the red banderole thoughtful officers had used to barren the street and slipped under it, ignoring the two men that immediately stepped out of the shadows of an entrance and hurried toward him. Two direct commands, sent to both men’s subconscious, sent them back to their observation and left him idle to walk past police cars, ambulances and coroners’ wagons. Schuldig stopped at a street corner and observed the busy hustle surrounding the bar.

 

Blue light and phantom shapes. Anyone else, anyone who had not undergone Eszet training and knew there was more to the world than things one could touch, smell and taste, would put what had happened here down to the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or something similar elusive. To Schuldig, the happenings were proof of so much more. What exactly, he did not know yet.

 

“What are you doing here?”

 

He turned at the enraged voice and lifted an eyebrow, unsurprised. “Good morning, Miss Manx.”

 

The chief of police had come up behind him and now lifted a hand to make a short, violent gesture.

 

“Don’t call me that,” Manx hissed, perfectly painted lips drawn back from white teeth. “Anyone could hear you here!”

 

“You think so?” Schuldig looked over her shoulder and saw the entourage the chief of police had come with regard both of them with curiosity. Men and women in white plastic suits – Tokyo’s Tech Force, if he recalled correctly – were unpacking equipment from two black mini vans parked at the curb. A handful of detectives stood inside the restricted area and spoke into cell phones. “Here on business, I assume.”

 

The red-haired woman glowered at him before she relented and stepped to his side. “What else is new in this city? There’s one murder for breakfast, one for lunch, and if I’m lucky I get two for dinner.”

 

The sarcastic comment made Schuldig smile as he looked down at her. As always dressed impeccably, Manx radiated a quiet but controlled anger and as much energy. He lightly brushed his conscience against her surface thoughts and encountered determination and the curiosity that seemed an inborn quality of every man and woman who worked for the police or some such agency. She was more surprised than angry to meet one of Schwarz here. Maybe she had been lucky enough to be able to put some of her past behind her.

 

“I suppose asking you if you or one of your group has something to do with this is beside the point.”

 

Schuldig leaned against the wall and put his hands back into his pockets. “You could say so.”

 

A heavy sigh. “I should arrest you. I should shoot you here and now, but something tells me I’m better off not doing it.”

 

“That’s your decision, not mine.” He nodded at the bar. “Found anything interesting?”

 

“Why don’t _you_ tell me?”

 

“We didn’t stick around long enough to collect any memorabilia.”

 

Manx crossed her arms over her chest and sighed again. Her heels clicked on the pavement as she took two steps toward the bar and looked back over her shoulder. This time, Schuldig was surprised, but it was a nice surprise. He had been fully prepared to force her into accompanying him into the place.

 

As they walked, Manx said, “We found a lot of corpses upon arrival on the scene, as well as a lot of handheld firearms. Two people were carrying small amounts of illegal substances, but I don’t think that really was a drug-related problem here.”

 

They were let into the bar without hassle. Amused, Schuldig watched her shoo out officers and tech workers. The floor of the bar was literally white with charcoal markings – outlines of bodies where they had fallen. Schuldig’s eyes sought out the spot Farfarello had occupied and found markings there, too. Ignoring Manx’s annoyed sound as he stepped over the markings, Schuldig crouched low near one and touched the floor with his fingertips.

 

“You’re contaminating evidence!” Manx snapped from behind him.

 

“Your people aren’t going to find anything substantial here. At least nothing that will make sense.” His attention was elsewhere at the moment. The floor inside the marking he crouched next to was coated with a fine layer of sand. It felt crystalline and very fine to the touch and had the color of coffee with milk. “What the hell is this?”

 

The sound of clicking heels, and Manx was crouched next to him. Schuldig wanted to needle her about contaminating evidence herself but thought better of it. He watched her touch a wet finger to a few grains and lift them up to eyelevel.

 

“Sand?”

 

“Brilliant, Sherlock. I can see that much myself. What is it doing here?”

 

Manx scowled and clapped her hands clean before she rose again. “I don’t know. Someone could’ve carried it in here in the profiles of their shoes.”

 

Schuldig rose as well. “And you don’t find it funny that there’s an equal amount of this ‘sand’ in each of those five markings, but apparently nowhere else?”

 

“Since when does your field of work include detective qualities?”

 

“You have no idea.” Schuldig looked around and saw a small, empty plastic bag left behind by one of the Tech people. As he went to retrieve it, he went on, “In my field of work as you so adequately put it, we’re dead if we don’t look at everything or ignore something.”

 

Which was not entirely the truth. Schuldig had always happily left it to Crawford when it came to investigating something; the mundane tasks of taking care of evidence or gleaning information had never interested him. His was the world of everything elusive, as Crawford had once put it so fittingly.

 

He picked up the plastic bag and scooped a small amount of the sand into it. As he held it up to the light, he saw that it seemed to be uniform: there were no larger or smaller grains, no dirt particles.

 

“Why are you back in Tokyo?”

 

Manx was looking at him looking at the sand. He picked up something akin to worry from her – Schwarz had been Tokyo’s prime suspects when it came to murder, ransom and everything else related to the underground world five years ago; it was only natural that the chief of police would be worried if Schwarz now returned to her city. They had never meddled in a gangster’s normal environment: petty drug deals or kidnappings had not interested Schwarz. The political scene had been their forte, with Reiji Takatori at the front.

 

“We have something to take care of.”

 

The smile she gave him was bitter. “Personal or business?”

 

“A bit of both.” Schuldig put the plastic bag into his pocket and looked around; there was nothing else here that seemed out of the ordinary. “I’m curious. You know one of us has been here all the time?”

 

“The white-haired one, yes.”

 

“’White-haired one’…you’re afraid of him, aren’t you?” He could feel his smile turn vicious and gentle at the same time; people had taken a step away from him when he smiled like that: the perfect mix between gentleness and the power to let others know that he knew exactly what they were thinking, if they knew what he was.

 

Manx held her own well. She tried not to show her tinge of panic at his smile and managed to turn it into a scowl of anger. Schuldig had never told her and would never tell her, but he marginally admired her for the bravery she had shown five years ago, when she had made her way into the falling Lazarus Temple and fought on the side of her own for what she held dear. He wondered what Crawford saw in her: the woman who had shot two of his fingers off, an enemy, or did the erstwhile leader of Schwarz admire Manx too?

 

“When that thing fell,” Manx began softly, “we thought we were rid of you once and for all. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you and your colleagues were the biggest, sharpest thorn Kritiker ever had in their side. We didn’t exactly spend a lot of time thinking about you after things had calmed down and you didn’t pop back up.”

 

“And then Farfarello pops back up, and you’re back where you started.”

 

“Not exactly. Kritiker disbanded shortly after three members of Weiss…’disappeared’. There were internal squabbles concerning the usefulness of the group as it was, and after Persia died we never managed to find a new leader.” For a moment, Manx’s eyes had a shine in them that was half regret and half sadness. She seemed wistful as she continued, “I applied for the position of chief of police. I’m not going to ask if you or Farfarello on his own had anything to do with Weiss disappearing. I don’t need an answer to that.”

 

Nor would she get one from Schuldig even if she asked. Farfarello had offhandedly mentioned Weiss had been ‘taken care of’. That could mean so many things. The only member of Weiss Schuldig could say was dead, was Omi Tsukiyono.

 

Manx continued, “Rumors started when Yakuza leaders started to disappear as well. Their bodies turned up horribly mutilated or not at all. Some of them…” She trailed off and waved a hand at the five markings next to them. “It’s not the first time I see this sand. To be honest, it keeps appearing now and then, and always in relation with murders. We just never managed to make anything of it. Some of my people think it’s some kind of personal note the killer leaves behind.”

 

Sand? What did Farfarello do to have sand appear when he killed someone? Schuldig touched the plastic bag in his pocket, trying to make sense of the news. He had never heard of a Gift that left sand behind after use. Or did the Gift do something to the bodies? Did it burn something? He would have to talk to Crawford and Nagi about it – and preferably to Farfarello, if Mr. ‘I’m Mysterious and Cool’ would ever get off his high horse. Schuldig found himself – once again – rather annoyed with Farfarello. He would have to do something against it before it became a common occurrence in his daily parody of a life.

 

“Farfarello didn’t mean to stay hidden, I think,” Manx said, more to the charcoal markings on the floor than to Schuldig. “He’s made it painfully obvious he’s here, right from the start.”

 

Curious, Schuldig asked, “So if you knew he was here all the time, why did you never try and get him?”

 

“We tried.” If possible, her voice got even softer. “We sent a squad team to that bar of his shortly after he opened it.”

 

“And?”

 

“No one came back alive. When the backup arrived at the scene, it appeared that all 20 men we’d sent had died of fatal cranial strokes while they were still sitting in their cars. There were no other marks on their bodies, no wounds, nothing. We couldn’t pin anything on him, or his people.” Manx opened her purse and fished a lipstick out, touching up lips that did not need it. Schuldig did not have to read her mind to know she was doing it to cover up welling emotions. He could see her hand shake as she put the lipstick back into her purse. “We sent 50 men next time. The same thing happened. Cause of death unknown, but apparently their lungs simply decided to stop working. The only thing both cases had in common was the same sand you see here, but as I said, we could never make any sense of it.”

 

Schuldig snorted. “So you’re giving him free reign over whatever he does because you’re afraid of him?”

 

His remark stung, he knew. Manx sighed and made a violent gesture with her hand as though to cut him off.

 

“When I first heard about him when I was still with Kritiker, I wouldn’t believe them. Someone who doesn’t feel pain…it was too crazy. I’ve seen a lot, I’m used to stomaching many strange things, but even you can’t deny that this teammate of yours is out of the ordinary.”

 

No, he could not. But Schuldig had been trained to deal with people like Farfarello on a daily basis; what was common grounds for the telepath was anything but for an ordinary human being raised on what was considered ‘right’ and ‘normal’ these days. He might have problems understanding how Farfarello did things, but that did not mean he would not believe it was possible. In his life, Schuldig had learned that anything was possible if only the means to do it existed.

 

“We’ve had agents who came back to headquarters after a visit to the Seventh Serpent and killed themselves right in front of our eyes as though they were carrying out an order. Ask any ordinary cop who has a little insight into the underground, and they will tell you that they won’t go near him. Some of the Yakuza leaders refuse to work with him because they think he will curse them. One told us he saw how Farfarello commanded someone to shoot themselves, and they did, just like that. He’s the devil, that’s what they say.”

 

“And what do you say?”

 

Manx smiled bitterly. “What I _could_ say to my superiors, concerning what you people are or what I think you might be, would get me fired on the spot. I’m not going anywhere near him.”

 

Did she know that ‘the Devil’ was sending her little presents in the form of corrupt politicians now and then? How much did she really know? Schuldig stared at Manx and wondered how deeply Kritiker had tried to dig into Eszet five years ago. What she had told him was not really new – few people would meet Farfarello, or any Gifted for that matter, and walk away thinking they had just met a nice individual.

 

He envisioned the power structure in Tokyo’s underground and saw it as an anthill. If not directly at the heart, then Farfarello was sitting close to the center, with enough power to pull many strings to make many people unhappy or turn them into corpses. It was unusual for a Gifted to create such a small empire on his own – but then again, having been through Rosenkreuz was the equivalent of being turned into a drone. Farfarello had never been there. The thought that he might need backup for whatever he was planning had most likely never occurred to the Irishman. He had his pawns, willing and unwilling, and that seemed to be enough.

 

But what would happen if one of those carefully selected pawns were to be taken out of the game? Schuldig found himself staring at Manx with an intensity that seemed to unsettle her. She was one of those individuals. Taking her out would not take more than ten seconds if he directly attacked her vital functions.

 

He made a sudden gesture with one hand, and then laughed softly as Manx jumped back. It was childish, maybe, but he enjoyed the power he had over people without having to use any of his real powers. Imagination of what could happen worked wonders sometimes.

 

“Have a nice day, Manx,” Schuldig said as he turned. “I’m sure we’ll cross paths again.”

 

**January 23 rd, 2002, Tokyo**

**1324 Hours**

 

The room was nothing Schuldig would have fancied as a permanent address, but for what he had in mind, it would do. He had spent the better part of an hour rearranging the shabby furniture until the space in the middle of the room had been cleared. Privacy was not a concern; the previous inhabitant lay dead in the bathtub, slowly bleeding white. The rest of the tenants had been convinced of a sudden need to spend the day in Ueno Park along with their children. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day indeed, the telepath thought as he drew the curtains over the single dirty window and shut out the rest of the light. A single lamp, barely giving any light, was trying its best from its place on the floor in a corner.

 

The woman in the other corner of the room tried to make herself as small as possible.

 

He had picked her up on the corner of the street and mentally convinced her that he would feed, bathe and clothe her. Her starved body and mind had not been a match for his telepathic skills at all; now she was to feed something else with all she was, if Schuldig was interpreting things right. He regarded her with little passion as he took a seat on the edge of the only chair in the room; everything in here seemed oily and dirty. Her eyes were a dull black lacking the most basic instinct common even to the most sophisticated animal of all: survival. He had not dug too deeply into her conscious thoughts and stopped meddling with her mind after robbing her off the ability to speak and the usage of her legs. To him, she did not even have a name.

 

“Frightened now, aren’t you?” It did not matter that she could not answer. “Don’t worry. I can’t promise that it won’t hurt, but I can promise that it’ll be over quickly. I think.”

 

She shook with fear and tried to make a sound, but all that came from her throat was a wheezing sound of air pressed out between her teeth. Schuldig looked away from her and stared at the door, as if staring at it would make Farfarello get here faster. Three quarters of an hour had passed since his call from a payphone to Crawford’s cell. The edgy undertone in the American’s voice had not escaped him, but for now, whatever was concerning Crawford was secondary to Schuldig’s planning. He had been content to learn that the Irishman was up and about, and had told him in clipped words where he was expecting him.

 

A short rapping on the door interrupted his thoughts. Schuldig rose from the chair and opened the door to find Farfarello standing outside. The Irishman still looked paler than usual, but Schuldig was ready to convince himself that Farfarello could even influence the color of his own skin to make others believe something else than what was the case. He stepped to the side and waved Farfarello through the door.

 

“What the fuck is going on here?” Farfarello asked as soon as he saw the woman in the corner. “Schu, what is this supposed to be?”

 

“See it as satisfying my curiosity.” Schuldig closed the door and turned the key. “Feeling any better, by the way?”

 

A muted nod; Farfarello did not look away from the woman. Schuldig took him by the shoulders and turned him around.

 

“I want you to do something for me.”

 

“I can see where this is going, and the answer is no.”

 

His fingers tightened on Farfarello’s shoulders. Roughly, Schuldig yanked the Irishman closer until their foreheads were touching and he was staring directly into Farfarello’s single eye. He did not pay any attention to Farfarello’s hands as they wound around his wrists.

 

“You’ve been a part of my life for so long, now do something for me.” He tightened his fingers even more as Farfarello tried to move his hands. “I’m tired of your games. I’m tired of learning something new every day. I don’t care what you think you are, but if you want any place in my life, you had better open up. I’m not going to let you toy around with me any longer.”

 

“You’ve been doing the same to others for years,” Farfarello shot back.

 

“Yeah. But you’re not me. Payback’s over. Unless there are any other matters between us you think need settling?”

 

Farfarello yanked his head backwards and then looked to the side. “I…” He trailed off and frowned angrily. “I can’t. Okay?”

 

“Why not? You could do it to those men in the bar, why not to this woman?”

 

No eye contact. Farfarello kept staring at something on the floor, refusing to answer. His hands had not lost their grip around Schuldig’s wrists, but he did not seem to pay any attention to that anymore. Schuldig quickly brought his hands up to Farfarello’s face and framed it, thumbs sliding over cheekbones, over the scars on one side and the strap of the eye patch on the other side. He was not surprised by the refusal; he had not been expecting the Irishman to do what he wanted him to. Yet, it angered him. Maybe, Schuldig thought as he turned Farfarello’s head until they were looking at each other again, it was not so much the refusal to show the power but the refusal to even acknowledge that he _had_ it.

 

“Why not?” he repeated, softer this time. His lips brushed Farfarello’s as he brought his face closer, but instead of a real kiss, there were only light touches, barely there. “Why not?”

 

Farfarello’s eye was nearly shut. He did not try to stop Schuldig as the telepath pushed his hands behind Farfarello’s head and instead let his own slip along Schuldig’s arms until they rested against his ribcage. Schuldig crossed his arms behind Farfarello’s head and gripped his own elbows, pressing his chest against Farfarello’s.

 

“It leaves me vulnerable,” Farfarello finally whispered against Schuldig’s mouth. “And I don’t like being weak.”

 

“Farfarello…” Damn, how he wished for mental contact between them right now. It would make this all so much easier. “I’ll watch over you. I promise. You’re feeling fine now, aren’t you?”

 

The Irishman’s eye opened wider, his stare became hard. “Does satisfying your curiosity justify putting me in a situation I don’t like?”

 

Schuldig heard the almost pleading undertone in his voice despite the hard stare, and he knew he nearly had him where he wanted him. Farfarello was trying to win a battle he had already lost.

 

“Do you trust me even a little?”

 

A mute nod.

 

“Then trust me not to betray that trust.” Schuldig placed a light kiss on his mouth. “That’s what it takes, Far. That’s what I need. If I can’t have even that tiny bit of trust from you, then it’s not worth it.”

 

A tremor ran through Farfarello’s body. Schuldig knew he was asking the impossible. Farfarello knew exactly what he was, but the telepath knew he also needed this from the Irishman, or even grounds between them would never be found.

 

Finally, Farfarello’s hands slid off Schuldig’s body. He turned around within the telepath’s arms. Schuldig let his arms slip lower until he could wind them around his waist.

 

He thought he heard someone laughing, but in the end, he could not be sure. He wanted to watch it, but in the end, the light was too bright, and he had to close his eyes against it. Painfully silent, he waited for the light to make a sound that never came, and he thought how movie directors were exaggerating things when they had sound for things that did not even have a name. The light came and faded just as quickly, and the only thing that he did hear in the end was the scraping of limbs over the floor as the woman moved feebly in the corner of the room.

 

He opened his eyes and saw something akin to a halo surround her. Farfarello’s hands were out in front of him as though he was directing the light to its destination. As before, the light went through the body of the victim and pushed a phantom shape out behind it. Fascinated, Schuldig watched the phantom shape, trying to make out distinct features, but the form was sexless and did not have a face. Schuldig felt Farfarello’s body gave a short, sharp jerk against his and tightened his arms around him. He felt a brief moment of absolute fear as then, in a rush, the phantom shape crashed through the woman’s body and raced toward him and Farfarello. What if it went right through the Irishman and…?

 

…in the end, all he felt was a push against his chest as Farfarello’s body was pushed backwards. Then, finally, a sound. Sand falling to a dry ground and Schuldig thought it was the most hair-rising thing he had ever heard in his entire life. Invisible, glassy wings moving against a window, or ant feet across a metal table, or all or none of those sounds, he could not be sure. Farfarello became all heavy and sprawled limbs against him; he simply fell backward. It took the telepath a moment to register that if he did not do something, they would both end up on the floor in a tangle of limbs. He took a hasty step backward to steady him and lowered the Irishman’s body to the ground, scooting around him.

 

Farfarello’s eye was open but half-lidded. “Happy now?” His voice sounded distant and tired.

 

Schuldig nodded. He looked over his shoulder. The woman looked as though she was sleeping, her face relaxed, eyes closed, mouth slack. On the floor around her, sand. The same sand he had seen in the bar, the same sand that rested in a plastic bag in his pocket.

 

“I still don’t understand,” Schuldig said, looking back to Farfarello.

 

“Neither do I.” The Irishman closed his eye and rolled his head against the floor. “I’m tired.”

 

Yet, he seemed to be brimming with energy now, other than the total breakdown in the bar. Schuldig laid his palm against Farfarello’s arm, and the skin was vibrant beneath his hand. Muscles were twitching all along his frame. If he did not know better, Schuldig could have sworn Farfarello was connected to an electric current.

 

“Whatever it is, you can kill with it,” he observed as he pulled Farfarello’s head into his lap. “When was the first time you used it?”

 

Farfarello rolled onto his side and buried his face against Schuldig’s stomach with a sigh. He curled his knees up to his chest. His voice came out muffled.

 

“I can’t hear you, Far.”

 

Another sigh, deeper this time. _Is this better?_

 

Direct mental contact with someone Schuldig knew was practically invisible to him came as a mild shock. During their time in Schwarz, due to the assumption Farfarello’s mind was a wasteland and not much more, Schuldig had tried to keep mental contact between them down to a minimum. Of course, there had been the odd contact here and there, during a mission when other means of communication had been out of the question, or the times he had tried gaining access into that wasteland, but he could count the times that had happened on one hand. Farfarello’s ‘mind voice’ did not sound much different from his actual voice. A little less substantial maybe and more of a dry whisper than it already was.

 

Now if only he could answer in kind. “Yes.”

 

_I used it the first time after the Lazarus Temple crashed._

 

“And you didn’t know you could use it?” Schuldig guessed. A nod confirmed his guess. “Farfarello…this sand that keeps appearing…I was in the bar a few hours ago, and I found the same sand there. Do you know what it is?”

 

_No. But I know that this sand has the color of the Lazarus Stone._

 

He tried to remember, tried to turn his mind five years into the past, into the high, echoing halls of the Lazarus Temple. They had all touched the Lazarus Stone, once or twice, when the original Elders had shown them the artifact that was supposed to bring Eszet the greatest possible power. He did not remember feeling anything when he had touched it. For that matter, Crawford, Nagi and he had touched the stone repeatedly ever since they had retrieved it from Omi Tsukiyono’s hands.

 

“What does it do when you use it?”

 

_It makes me tired, isn’t that obvious?_

 

“Anything else besides that?”

 

_I don’t know what exactly it does, but I don’t like using it. It’s a last resort if I see no other way out, or if I’ve been wounded. Usually it makes me tired, but it also helps speeding the healing process up quite a bit._

 

Farfarello curled himself up tighter and buried his face deeper against Schuldig’s stomach, and the telepath guessed their conversation was at an end. It had left him with more questions than answers. He stroked his fingers through the Irishman’s short hair and trailed them down his neck, over his shoulder and side, until he could slip them under the hem of his shirt at his beltline. Settling his hand firmly against Farfarello’s side, he curled his other arm around his head and held him. There was not much else he could do now.

 

\---

 

He woke from the vibrating alarm of his cell phone and needed a moment to remember that he did not have a cell phone. Awareness of his surroundings kicked in, and Schuldig spent a long minute staring at the corpse in the corner until he remembered where he was, and with whom.

 

He must have fallen asleep while waiting for Farfarello to wake back up. They were on the floor, curled into each other, Farfarello’s knees pulled up to nearly his chin, his face still pressed against Schuldig’s stomach; Schuldig on his side, one leg thrown over the Irishman’s, felt every bone in his body protest the hard floor as he carefully untangled himself and tried to determine where that infernal buzzing was coming from. He finally found the small cell phone in the back pocket of Farfarello’s pants.

 

“’lo?”

 

Silence on the other end. Schuldig cleared his throat and patted his jacket for cigarettes. “If you don’t talk to me I can’t tell Far who’s there.”

 

“This is Hajime Akkai. Could I talk to Mr. O’Siodhachain, please?”

 

Farfarello used his real name? This was interesting. Schuldig looked down at the sleeping Irishman and felt protectiveness wash over him at the sight of that single closed eye and the features relaxed in the grip of sleep.

 

“He’s sleeping right now.”

 

A prolonged pause. Then, “Will you leave a message for him? Tell him Akkai Electronics would be very interested in acquiring the object we spoke of, and that we are indebted to his generosity.”

 

“Sure, I’ll tell him. Have a nice day.”

 

He shut off the cell phone and prodded Farfarello with a finger. “Wake up, Far.”

 

Farfarello rolled away from him and buried his face in his arms. “How can I sleep when you’re making so much noise?”

 

So he had been awake throughout the phone call, possibly longer. Schuldig snorted and prodded him again, evoking a grunt.

 

“Some guy just called, Hajime something. Wanted me to tell you that he’s interested in buying some object.”

 

“Mh.”

 

“What object was he speaking of?”

 

Another roll, this time onto his back, and Farfarello stretched like a cat. Schuldig observed that the bone-deep tiredness had seemingly fled him entirely.

 

“Takatori’s tower.”

 

He found his cigarettes and lit one. Farfarello’s statement made him lift an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you own this thing as well?”

 

“No. Tsukiyono owned it. I was the temporary owner, and soon Akkai will own it. That way Eszet can’t buy it.”

 

Schuldig remembered Farfarello telling them that Tsukiyono had died because he had had the Lazarus Stone, and because Eszet wanted the Takatori Tower as their stronghold. “Smart move. They won’t be happy, of course.”

 

Farfarello chuckled at the ceiling and rolled onto his side, pillowing his head on his arm. “They won’t be happy about a lot of things once they set foot on Japanese soil.”

 

“We still have to take care of the Eszet agents who already are here.” There was a slightly revolting smell to the already stuffy air of the room. He looked to the corpse in the corner and felt the need to leave; Schuldig had never enjoyed the company of the dead and slowly decomposing. “Let’s get out of here. What time is it? Whee…Crawford is going to love us for staying away half of the day.”

 

It was dark outside when they left, the air cool. A breeze from the ocean brought salt to the thousand fragrances of the city, mingling with the barely detectable smells of oil, exhaust fumes and humans all piled into cramped quarters.

 

Farfarello wanted to pick his car up from the garage near the Seventh Serpent. They stopped at a small restaurant on the way there and had a quick meal consisting of ramen and vegetables. This time, Schuldig did a mental sweep of the occupants of the restaurant before he decided it was safe enough to relax a little. He did not need a repeat performance of what had happened at the bar the night before.

 

Halfway through their meal, a small, wiry man approached their table and greeted Farfarello. He had the compact built of one used to quick fights and hard work, the scars on his hands and forearms speaking in their own secret language. Farfarello introduced him as Eiji. He was the leader of a small gang of street rats – gangs specialized on selling drugs on Tokyo’s boulevards and back streets.

 

Schuldig picked up an unusual amount of anxiousness from Eiji as the man sat down at their table and ordered a beer. It did not take him long to figure out why: Eiji was one of those men who were to support Farfarello at the harbor when the Elders arrived.

 

“Are your men prepared?” Farfarello asked after chatting amiably a few minutes.

 

Eiji turned his beer bottle in the ring of condense water on the table. “Yes. They are waiting. But we need the weapons you said you would get us.”

 

The Irishman sent Schuldig a small smile and nodded. “Tomorrow evening at the Seventh Serpent, I will bring you your weapons. Have Akira bring the van. You will need it to transport them.”

 

They talked about the weather and the price of sake in the bars of Ginza before Eiji left.

 

“You’ve really taken care of everything, haven’t you?” Schuldig said as soon as Eiji was out of the door.

 

Farfarello smiled again, but this time it was a cold, razor-sharp smile. “Things have started to move.”

 

They returned to the apartment in Dogenzaka close to midnight. Farfarello parked the Jeep behind the building and together, they unloaded three crates from it. The house close to the Seventh Serpent, its man-high freezer containing not only the mortal remains of the nameless agent Weyland had set afire, but also an impressive amount of illegal explosives, was used as a storage space for weapons as well. Schuldig had felt like a child in a candy store as Farfarello led him up to the second floor. There had even been an old, Russian grenade launcher stored away beneath a heavy cloth.

 

The weapons they carried upstairs in the three crates were much smaller and in many ways more deadly than the grenade launcher. Semi-automatic, automatic, silenced – meant to destroy flesh, not buildings.

 

Even Crawford, slightly irked at their returning so late, became a little giddy at the sight of them. They were all killers at heart.

 

**January 24 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**0944 Hours**

 

Life is a puzzle, and we are given one piece at a time to try to fit them together into something that will make sense in the end. There are no rules, no defined spaces, and no map to help us figure out the meaning of each piece; we do not know if the picture we are building on one year at a time will make sense in the end. Most of us will look at the half-finished picture and decide it is enough, it is done, and may the rest of the puzzle pieces fall where they want. It does not interest us. You can only know so much.

 

Schuldig knew that, and more.

 

He stared at the bag of sand and wished it could talk, wished it would tell him of its origin, its purpose. Answers had been plentiful in coming lately; some he had wanted to hear for years, some he had never wanted to ask the questions to. Some he had not known he was asking. That he had no choice in the matter was clear to him: you start, you try, you end. There are no in-betweens. In many ways, the sand had become symbolic for Farfarello, just like glasses and cool conversations had been symbols standing for Crawford once; Nagi was the all-knowing, everywhere-going blue wire leading into the depths of the internet.

 

Schuldig, creature of habits and all the bad ones, needed drawers he could stuff things into, never mind he preferred to remain outside of such a drawer. He had drawn simple outlines for the world he lived in and lived by them, and what did not conform to these schematics remained a mystery that tickled his fancy or his annoyance.

 

Farfarello tickled both, and the sand, graspable, real, currently annoyed the telepath to no end. Though he did not feel there were any resounding echoes of doom connected to it, there nevertheless _was_ something not fully tangible that smiled at him from the simple, round grains as they reflected the overhead lights of the living room.

 

He took his attention off the sand and stretched, feeling the disks of his spine protest the movement. Farfarello and Crawford, sitting at a quickly purchased table on cheap chairs, were not staring daggers at or insulting each other for once: on the table between them lay an impressive collection of firearms. Both men were armed with an oiled cloth and various cleaning items. Nagi, at Crawford’s left, was turning a small handgun over and looking at it disdainfully.

 

“I don’t see why I should use it.” The telekinetic pulled the sledge of the weapon back and let it snap back into place. “I can stop a bullet coming at me in mid-air. I can blow up entire houses. Why do I have to take this thing? It’s useless!”

 

“Don’t fret, Nagi.” Crawford, his usual composed calm, expertly cleaned the muzzle of a black, well-used Beretta 9mm. It was his own gun; the American had explained at length how he preferred a used gun to a new one. Glitches were known, and a jammed bullet would not come in handy when Eszet arrived in Tokyo. “You may be able to stop a bullet, they aren’t. At least some of them aren’t. Think of it as a backup. We don’t know how many people we will face, and you know how taxing it is to use your powers for an extended length of time.”

 

“I am not fretting.” Nagi caught Schuldig’s eyes from across the table and rolled his own.

 

“We won’t be the only people with guns at the harbor,” Farfarello said quietly, drawing Schuldig’s attention. The Irishman sat with his knee against the edge of the table, assembling a semi-automatic. “My people will be there.”

 

_Cannon fodder_ , Schuldig thought. He remembered Eiji’s agitated, anxious behavior from the night before. He leaned back in his chair and watched his lover. Farfarello acted quiet and calm since they had returned from Schuldig’s little ‘experiment’ and their late trip to the Seventh Serpent. Schuldig had explained to Crawford what he had done; the American had taken in the news with a raised eyebrow and a small shrug. He had looked at the sand and shrugged again.

 

“If it is of use to us, then why bother?” Crawford had said evenly. “I know you’re curious, but I suggest we wait with any more experiments until we’ve taken care of the situation at hand.”

 

Schuldig had agreed, but that did not mean his mind would let him rest. He had seen twice now what using this second power did to Farfarello. Was there a little concern added to the equation? Of course. He vividly pictured them in the middle of a shoot-out with Eszet and Farfarello collapsing because of it. Or losing control over it. It would put them as well as the Irishman at risk.

 

Schuldig felt the first hints at a bad feeling about what was to come. It sounded so easy when written down on paper: wait for the day they arrive, go to harbor. Shoot everyone. Live happily ever after.

 

People rarely lived happily ever after, that he knew, but that was not his current growing concern. It was the ‘easy’ part that concerned him; Schuldig had spent long enough in Eszet’s embrace to know it would be anything but.

 

“When are you going to meet your men tonight, Far?” Crawford asked. He had finished cleaning his gun and picked up a pump-gun from the stack in front of him.

 

“Half past ten. I have to go there alone.”

 

To Schuldig’s surprise, Crawford nodded, and did not start anther argument. The telepath knew it irked Crawford to have the tables turned on himself: five years ago, he had been in charge of Schwarz and their clients. Whatever plans were made, Crawford executed them and directed the remaining three members when and where they were needed. Perhaps Crawford remembered some of their clients’ reluctance to talk matters through with anyone but him; not because Schuldig or Nagi were not to be trusted but because those clients had been more used to Crawford than to any of the others. Farfarello as a bargaining partner had been out of the question back then. To have to rely on the Irishman’s decisions now was hard for the American.

 

Hell. It was hard for them all.

 

“And I mean alone.” Farfarello went on, sending Schuldig a meaningful look.

 

The telepath held up his hands in mock surrender and stood, lazily picking his way toward the table. They had spent the better part of the morning trying to turn the empty living room into impromptu headquarters, but their old apartment was and would forever be only a ruin of what Schwarz once had been. Later, they would have to go out and look for field beds. Sleeping on the floor, even if this was war, was out of the question.

 

“I was thinking assassinating a few Eszet agents would be more fun, anyway.” He picked a sharpshooter’s rifle from the table and hefted it in one hand. “What do you say, Crawford, are we going to knock politely, or do we just barge in and shoot everything that moves?”

 

The American chuckled and picked up an empty magazine to start filling it with bullets. “We’ve been silent for so long…and we’re on the express elevator to hell, anyway…silent just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

 

“Are we going to kill them all in one night?” Nagi awkwardly fitted a magazine into his gun, taking great care to not come too close to the safety latch with his fingers.

 

“We have to,” Schuldig said. “Unless we want to run the chance of them alerting their buddies on sea or each other.”

 

It was going to be a busy night, he knew. Eight Eszet agents and their bodyguards. There was no telling how alert they would be after the previous massacre at the fish market. Schuldig hoped his, Crawford and Nagi’s presence in Tokyo had gone unnoticed so far – they knew about Farfarello, but not about them. Nagi had already found out the addresses of all eight agents, but what if one of them was not home?

 

He realized he was thinking up worst-case scenarios and sighed. “How are we going about it, anyway, Crawford?”

 

“We’ll split up. Two of them live in the same apartment building near Ginza, we’ll meet there. Each of us takes two, then we’ll take out the rest together. That way we can keep it relatively safe.” Crawford looked at Nagi and Schuldig, awaiting confirming nods.

 

“I’ll meet with my people and come back here, then.” Farfarello finished the semi-automatic and stood, raising his arms above his head for a stretch. “If everything’s decided then, I’ll be out back. I need to check something on the Jeep.”

 

When Farfarello was out of the door, and they had heard the front door close behind him, Crawford turned to Schuldig and held out his hand. On his palm lay a tiny, square, flat object, barely larger than the first digit of his small finger.

 

“I want you to get this thing on him somehow.”

 

Schuldig took the object with two fingers and held it up to the light. “Tracing device?”

 

“Yes. For his safety as well as our own.” Crawford turned and made a sign to Nagi, who was already flipping the lid of his laptop up. “You trust him, I don’t. That way we can at least keep track of him.”

 

_I’m still not sure I really trust him either_ , Schuldig thought. He turned the object over in his hand and wondered where he was supposed to hide it. Most of Farfarello’s clothing was skin-tight, and he usually did not carry bags or backpacks. The idea came when he thought about what the Irishman usually did carry around.

 

\---

 

The morning sun lengthened the shadows cast by the apartment building as Schuldig stepped out into the desolate backyard. It was cool this morning; he wore an oversized sweater that hid his hands. He wandered over to the Jeep and found Farfarello sitting in the backseat, legs stretched out of the door, speaking into his cell phone. He looked up as Schuldig came closer and tried a smile, then rapidly spoke into the phone, a frown deepening on his face.

 

Checking something on the Jeep, indeed.

 

Schuldig lifted his right hand, and the sleeve fell back to reveal the apple he held. Waggling it at the Irishman, he leaned against the side of the car and reached for the knife he knew Farfarello carried against the back of his belt. Finding and extricating it from the sheath took some fumbling, and he enjoyed it. He had to chuckle as the Irishman batted at him with his free hand, and knelt down, pushing Farfarello’s legs apart with his body and balancing the apple on Farfarello’s right knee so he could slip both arms around him.

 

“Yes, deposit the money in the usual account. Yes, the one I’ve given you.” A slightly annoyed growl as Schuldig briefly dug his hands into Farfarello’s sides. “Cut that out, you. No, not you. I have someone sitting between my legs trying to tickle me. Yes, you heard me right.”

 

He found the hilt of the knife and pulled it from the sheath. It was the work of three seconds to push the tracing device he had held between middle and ring finger into the narrow opening of the sheath and make sure it lay on the bottom. All of Farfarello’s knife sheaths had room to spare at the end, because he claimed otherwise the tips of the knives would get dull from the contact with the leather. Making sure he did not cut Farfarello’s side as he drew the knife to between their bodies, Schuldig caught the apple just as it began to roll off the Irishman’s knee and leaned up to plant a quick kiss on his lips between words, smirking at the annoyed growl it got him.

 

By the time Farfarello finished his phone call, Schuldig had the apple quartered. He silenced any jabs about being annoying by shoving a quarter into the Irishman’s mouth. And then another.

 

“You know, you look just like a cute little chipmunk with your cheeks stuffed like that.”

 

Farfarello glared daggers at him and chewed, then, “Didn’t hear you say anything like that when I had your cock down my throat.”

 

“I was occupied with other things at that time.”

 

“Glad to hear it.”

 

“Was that Akkai you just spoke to?” He feigned indifference, dividing the last quarter of apple with a bite and offering half to Farfarello.

 

“Yeah. In less than 36 hours, a rather large sum of money will be deposited to my Swiss bank account, and the Takatori Tower is history. I hear they want to completely remodel it.”

 

“There isn’t much they can remodel about it.”

 

“A building stands and falls with its owner.” The Irishman made a gesture at the apartment building behind them. “Just like this part of Dogenzaka is going to be demolished soon because the tenants of all those buildings moved out. Were moved out, rather.”

 

“Mh.” Schuldig wiped his hands on his pants and leaned against the side of the Jeep. “How long will you be at that meeting tonight?”

 

Farfarello put his cell phone away and considered, sucking on his lower lip. It was a habit of the Irishman’s Schuldig found quite delicious.

 

“Two hours, maybe three. I have to make sure everyone knows their places. The last thing I need is for things to go wrong because someone is hasty.”

 

“Crawford, Nagi and I shouldn’t take longer, either.” The telepath sighed softly, then leaned down to put his elbows on Farfarello’s shoulders, his fingers threading through the short, ruffled hair at the back of Farfarello’s head. “And when that is done, I’m gonna fuck you silly.”

 

Farfarello’s eye narrowed slightly, the smile spreading on his face sly. “Shouldn’t we wait with that until we’ve taken care of Eszet?”

 

“Nope. It’s just going to be a taste of what I’m going to do with you once we’ve done that.”

 

Muscles tightened under his hands as Farfarello exhaled softly and leaned up until their lips met. The tip of his tongue darted out to swipe across Schuldig’s lower lip in a teasing touch that left Schuldig wanting for more.

 

“What speaks against now?” Farfarello’s voice was rougher than usual, his breathing a little faster. He began to pull Schuldig into the Jeep as he leaned backward. “You can always up the ante, later.”

 

\---

 

Somehow, they managed. Somehow, the backseat of Farfarello’s Jeep was spacious enough. Somehow, it did not matter that anyone could see them anytime.

 

Somehow, the antibiotic ointment’s sting they used faded after a while. Somehow, Farfarello’s quiet if urgent moans were music that could have filled an orchestra hall.

 

Schuldig lived now and here, at least sometimes, and he tried to enjoy those moments to the fullest. Moving on Farfarello’s lap, his fingers digging into the upholstery, it was slower than before, darker, hotter, and better. His teeth found the perfect patch on Farfarello’s neck to settle into with a firm hold, and his nose found the nook that was scented just right. The Irishman met his moves with upward thrusts that sent waves of fire through Schuldig’s stomach each time the head of Farfarello’s cock brushed his prostrate.

 

Somehow, they just fit.

 

**January 25 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**0100 Hours**

 

They set out in two cars: Crawford’s rented BMW, and Farfarello’s Jeep. At Dogenzaka’s east end, where middle-class poverty gave way to middle-class style, they stopped at an intersection of the road. Schuldig, in the backseat of the BMW, glanced over at the Jeep and caught Farfarello’s eye before the Irishman made a turn that would bring him straight into the screaming heart of the city. Ginza’s halo of blue, pink and neon yellow sat like an upturned bowl of filigree fog in the distance. Schuldig envisioned the dark backstreet behind the Seventh Serpent and thought he could just make out the hunger in the eyes of the men Farfarello was going to meet. He could smell the rot clinging to the ancient stones, the alcohol and smoke on the breath of the gang members, the sweat on their skin and the fire in their veins.

 

Tonight would be beautiful in so many ways.

 

“Nagi, we’re driving you to about three blocks away from Sylvia Lin’s apartment. From there on, you know where to go. Daniel Tyson lives two streets down from her place. Schu, Yuuya Yamasaki and Takumi Ogawa. I’ll take care of Lena Olberg and Andrea Scarlatti. That leaves us with Anthony Perkins and Hikaru Abe.” Crawford directed the BMW toward the Imperial Palace Garden, eyes on the traffic. “We’ll meet at the tower, in two hours at the latest.”

 

Schuldig nodded; he did not pay attention to Crawford and Nagi in the front seats. On his lap, he held the tracing monitor that showed him the route Farfarello was taking. The small, red point racing across the screen moved in ways only a driver with intimate knowledge of the city could move. He noted Farfarello was taking the direct route to the Seventh Serpent; it calmed him down, somehow, as if expecting…what?

 

That doubt would once again rear its head? That they, he, would find themselves face to face with another of Farfarello’s charades?

 

With an inaudible sigh, Schuldig admitted to himself that he had anticipated the Irishman to take a different route, and not attend the meeting at the bar. Perhaps Farfarello was not the only one who had to give a little, trust a little. Although he knew he should not, the telepath felt twinges of remorse for having put the tracing device where it was now in the first place. And when he thought about it, that in itself was again annoying enough to justify doing it. Farfarello had made Schuldig care for him, now the Irishman could damn well live with the consequences.

 

It was a rather lame excuse, but it was the best he could come up with.

 

Where Farfarello had taken the eastward route to Ginza, they took the Meiji-dori southwards. Crossed at its lower half by the gleaming veins of the Expressway No 3 Shibuyasen line, the Meiji-dori is one of Tokyo’s many aortas. Past Yoyogi Park and the National Garden of Naitomachi, the street leads past many sightseeing delicacies until it begins to branch out and connect the Southern districts of the city. They stopped at the southwest corner of the National Garden, where the Meiji-dori meets the eastward-bound Shinjuku-dori, and left Nagi standing at the curb. Schuldig took the opportunity to switch seats and move into the front of the car.

 

“Make it quick,” Crawford instructed. “The less attention it gets, the better.”

 

Nagi nodded curtly and turned away. Schuldig watched him until the lithe Japanese man disappeared in the throngs of people on the sidewalk.

 

“Did you tell Far to meet us at the tower after he’s done with his business?” Crawford pulled back out into the traffic, a hellacious affair at this time of the night.

 

“I told him not to bother if it takes longer than two hours and come straight back to the apartment if that’s the case.” The telepath watched the city as it flew past the side window.

 

They were rapidly nearing Bunkyo-ku, where he would find his prey. Yuuya Yamasaki and Takumi Ogawa lived close to the Tokyo Dome, their apartment houses no more than 200 feet apart. Schuldig estimated it would take him twenty minutes for each man, if luck was on his side. He had to enter the buildings, find the apartments, hope the men were indeed at home, kill them, and then make his way back to Uenokõen and the Takatori Tower. It would be a tight fit, but Schuldig knew how to work under pressure. Had been doing it for years, back then under Takatori Reiji’s thumb.

 

Before long, the rainbow-colored lights of the Tokyo Dome’s surrounding amusement park began to take up their share of the night sky. Opened in 1998, the Tokyo Dome’s bizarre and gaudily-colored structure is pure candy for the eyes. Its main building has been given the nickname “Big Egg”. From above, the dome’s roof looks like a white pie laid out nicely in a foundation of neon pink, blue and green light-cherries. It has something Disney-like to it, this exaggerated sports and concert hall, with its two basement and six elevated floors.

 

Next to the Tokyo Dome, the Tokyo Dome Hotel shoots into the sky like a blue needle. There is nothing Disney-like about it. The hotel is evidence of cold calculating and precise architecture, with no space left for dreaming. It seems sterile next to the Big Egg. At the south end of the vast site, the Kandagawa River parts Tokyo’s playground from Tokyo’s dirt.

 

From January 24th till January 30th, the Tokyo Dome hosted the “Japan Grand Prix International Orchid Festival 2002”. [7]

 

Crawford stopped at the east exit of the JR Line Sudobashi, which runs parallel to the Kandagawa River. He kept his eyes on the people moving across the street as Schuldig got out of the car. Noise from outside, thousands of voices, and with them the overwhelming smell of flowers. The telepath felt overwhelmed by the fragrance for a long moment and needed to keep a hand on the roof of the BMW until his senses had sorted everything out. He was reminded of the first time he had set foot in that confounded flower shop of their rivaling assassin group, Weiss Kreuz. How anyone could live with this constant smell of sweet, sweeter, and then pungent, was beyond him. Perhaps a dead sense of smell as well as taste did have its merits for an assassin.

 

He rapped his knuckles on the roof of the BMW and stepped away from it, watching the car pull away out of the corner of his eyes. He moved with the people, his and their faces bathed in neon shades, and managed to get out of the pressing throng of humanity before they swept him along into the source of the now stagnating, too-good smell of millions of orchids. Let flowers be for those who can endure their smell. The fragile barriers between Schuldig’s mind and those around him were not endangered by the smell, but his nose was, and having to concentrate on his nose rather than his mental capacities earned him an unsettling queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as he arrived at the south-east corner of the Tokyo Dome site. He crossed the Hakusan-dori at the east side of the site and was glad to find himself in the much quieter neighborhood of apartment buildings.

 

Finding the building Yuuya Yamasaki resided in did not take longer than ten minutes. It was a square block with small windows and a little green at the entrance door, something to please the eye, something to rival the gaudiness of the Tokyo Dome. Schuldig pushed the main entrance door open and extended his Gift through the building, at once connecting himself with hundreds of sleeping and only a few waking minds. Hands in his trouser pockets, he studied the tenant list carved into a golden plate next to the doors of the elevator. Yuuya Yamasaki lived on the fifth floor, and he would die there tonight.

 

Provided he was home.

 

Out of habit, Schuldig pulled his mind back to himself as he rode the elevator up to the fifth floor. He did not know much about Yuuya Yamasaki, only that he worked for Eszet and was possibly Gifted; that alone was enough to make the telepath tread more carefully than he would have had Yamasaki been an ordinary human being. They had not been able to find thorough information on the man, and Farfarello’s description had been vague. The Irishman had met the Eszet agent only a handful of times and spoken to him on the phone mostly. Farfarello thought of Yamasaki as ‘old prey’.

 

_Well, let’s see about that._

 

The elevator stopped its upward journey with a ‘ding’. Schuldig remained where he was, one finger on the emergency stop button, and listened. He heard the distant hum of air conditioners, a TV set, and from further away, noises from outside: cars, people, faint music. Collecting his thoughts, he stepped out of the elevator and looked down both sides of the long, narrow corridor he stood in. Doors on both sides, each one looking identical. Name plates next to each door. Schuldig picked the left side of the corridor and walked along the doors, reading names as he passed. The name plate ‘Yamasaki’ belonged to the door at the far end of the corridor, right next to an emergency exit sign.

 

The rooms beyond the door appeared empty to a quick mental sweep. He picked up something from within that _was_ alive, but its thought processes were too simple, too fixated to belong to a human. A cat, a mouse, some small animal like that.

 

Safe, or sorry?

 

Schuldig put his hand against the door, fingertips barely touching the wood. He took a soft breath, closed his eyes, and _pushed_ with all his mind gave, experiencing the familiar feeling of vertigo and queasiness in his stomach as the world around him shook in its foundations once; shapes before his eyes, the door, tripled before settling back down to everyday normalcy. He waited until his stomach had settled down as well and then studied the door lock.

 

Safe, or sorry?

 

Oh, screw this.

 

The SIG-Sauer looked strange with a silencer screwed on, but that was the price he had to pay for mostly undetected murdering. Two bullets between lock and door jamb, followed by the smell of singed wood, and the door rocked before it swung open a few inches.

 

Allowing a stench to greet the telepath. He had to take a step back, surprised by the pungent, ripe smell that wafted out of the door as he pushed it further open. Bile rose in his throat, the hairs on the back of his neck rising with it. That was what death smelled like, old death. Schuldig knew what sight would greet him inside, but he had to be sure, had to make sure Yamasaki was dead.

 

And when he had done this, he would go and _kill_ Farfarello.

 

Oily and sticky, the air inside. His eyes watered as Schuldig stepped into the apartment and looked around. Kitchen, empty. Living room, empty. The door to what seemed to be the bathroom was closed, but he did not need to look inside. Schuldig could see the mess on the bed through the half-open door to the bedroom. Cockroaches and flies, all dead, surrounded the heavily decomposed corpse that lay in the center of the bed. Breathing through his mouth – and when had _that_ ever helped? – Schuldig stepped closer and stumbled over the carcass of a small, grey cat lying a few steps into the room. That had been the animalistic mind he had sensed within the apartment. Flies and cockroaches, though capable of something similar to human thought, did not think ‘loudly’ enough for a telepath to detect them. He shoved the carcass of the cat aside with his foot and moved closer to the bed.

 

Putrefaction had left the male corpse unrecognizable. Flesh and clothing were already beginning to melt and disintegrate with each other; Yamasaki, if that was him, had to be dead for at least two weeks already. The corpse lay as if arranged, legs straightened out atop moldering bedcovers seeped with pungent fluids. Its hands were laid carefully on top of its chest as if in prayer. Schuldig leaned closer and unerringly found the frayed edges in what once had been a silk shirt. A cockroach was stuck headfirst in the inconspicuous entrance wound where a knife had gone straight through clothing, skin and ribs into the heart and ripped it apart. Farfarello’s handiwork.

 

The corpse had no eyes anymore, which was not surprising with the amount of cockroaches and flies around. The soft tissues always went first. The cat, hungry, must have done its share of damage as well. The corpse’s fingers were gnawed down to bone on one hand. He could not make out the expression Yamasaki had worn in the second of death, but it had to have been one of surprise given how Farfarello worked when he was out to just kill someone.

 

“What a load of…” Schuldig turned to leave the bedroom and stopped dead. On the wall above the door, someone – no, not someone, Farfarello – had painted a crude sign with blood. It was brown in color by now, but recognizable enough for the telepath to make out a square shape with a cross above it. He let his eyes wander, searching for more ‘paintings’, but the one above the door was the only one – in this room. Schuldig searched the apartment. Instead of another painting he found a box filled with bags of sand under the kitchen table.

 

The bag containing the sand he had taken from the floor of the bar was at the Schwarz apartment, but Schuldig knew the sand in the box was the same. Uniform, smooth, no distinct features other than being just sand.

 

He had to think. Undoubtedly, if Yamasaki was dead, everyone else was dead as well. Nagi and Crawford would find corpses, too. It gave him some time; time to find Yamasaki’s laptop in its case next to the coffee table in the living room. As he waited for it to power up, he lit a cigarette and contemplated giving Crawford a call on his cell phone. But no, useless. The American was not stupid. He would string two and two together, contact Nagi, and then go straight to Uenokõen to wait for Schuldig.

 

The taste of the cigarette made the taste left by the smell halfway bearable. Schuldig called up Yamasaki’s email program and checked the last received email. It dated to January the 6th. That must have been the day Yamasaki had died, more than two weeks ago. The body of the email contained fragments of words and numbers; undoubtedly, some scrambling program had been at work here or had to be used to decipher the email, but he did not have enough time for that now.

 

_What the fuck is going on here…?_

 

He sat back on the couch and closed his eyes for a long moment. Then opened them again as a loud beeping from the laptop announced the arrival of new mail. The computer had to have inbuilt satellite receiving programs. Schuldig had only connected it to a power outlet, not the phone system. He moved closer to the laptop again and called up the email it had received, raising an eyebrow as a small window popped up and informed him that the message he was about to read would destruct itself within the space of a minute.

 

The body of the email contained only a single line: _Arrival January 25_ _th_ _, approx. 0300 hours, Takeshiba Pier. Awaiting confirmation._

 

The telepath stared at the single line until it began to scramble itself. In the end, he was looking at the same fragments of words and numbers as he had in the other email.

 

January 25th. That was today.

 

** January 25 th , 2002, Tokyo **

**0158 Hours**

 

The middle of the night, and Tokyo is almost as silent as a graveyard. Almost. There are stretches of silence mingled with pockets of noise; life goes on behind doors and windows, though not as loudly as it does in the middle of the day. Some still believe that ghosts roam at night, ghosts best left undisturbed. Light, and noise – every culture has its own means of trying to keep the demons away, but light and noise feature in almost every ritual of the world. Sometimes the simple things work best. Ghosts have to be afraid of something, too.

 

Along the great streets of the city, streetlights hold silent, everlasting vigil. The tall skyscrapers, pillars of light, and some say if you connect all the streets and all the skyscrapers of Tokyo, you will have a mirror image of the stars in the sky above the city. Not all, maybe, but most. You can only have so much, at a time.

 

Past the Tokyo Dome, past Tokyo University, toward Uenokõen, and light was Schuldig’s steady companion. Had the telepath been in a more reflective mood, he would have contemplated how nothing worked without light these days. Blue, sometimes red, sometimes yellow or pink or green, the neon signs of Tokyo greeted him and then waved good bye as he passed them, their shadows on his and the cab driver’s face chased away by yet another concoction of brightness. Schuldig paid no attention to it, and the cab driver, or what was left of his seized mind, had eyes only for the street in front of them. Few cars, mostly cabs, were on the concrete at this hour.

 

Before long, the majestic silhouette of the Takatori Tower began to pierce the night sky. He did not wait until the cab came to a complete halt, but opened the passenger door and hurried out as soon as they arrived at the plaza in front of the tower. Crossing the street, and there was Crawford, standing next to the BMW close to the entrance doors. A wave of anger greeted the telepath as soon as he came within earshot of the American.

 

“What the fuck is going on here?” Crawford half-screamed, half-shouted.

 

“Harbor,” Schuldig said simply. Crawford’s eyes were alive with unholy fires, and now was not the time to play games or withhold information. “Yamasaki is dead. I read an email that said something about someone arriving at the harbor at about three in the night today.”

 

Crawford checked his watch, lips drawn back from his teeth in a snarl. “That’s in an hour.”

 

“He tricked us again.” There was no need to explain who the ‘he’ in question was. Schuldig stepped around Crawford and opened the door to the car, lifting the tracing monitor from the backseat. The red dot was stationary, blinking steadily at coordinates in the heart of Ginza. “Where is Nagi?”

 

“On the way,” Crawford said tightly. “He gave me a phone call just when I’d arrived near Andrea Scarlatti’s home. I didn’t bother checking on her or Olberg when he told me his targets were already dead.”

 

Schuldig shook his head. “God damn you, Far,” he whispered. “What are you planning?”

 

As if to answer him, the red dot on the tracing monitor began to move away from its spot.

 

“He’s moving.”

 

“I goddamn well know he’s moving, Schuldig!” Crawford snapped. “He’s going to the harbor. Fucking – fucking psychopath!”

 

Nagi’s lithe form appeared across the plaza. The young man was fairly out of breath as he arrived at the car. He took one look at the tracing monitor in Schuldig’s hand and another at Crawford’s face.

 

“They’re arriving today, aren’t they?”

 

\---

 

It was folly. To try and face the new Elders with only his own powers and a handful of mere human lackeys at his back, Farfarello was bound to fail.

 

Or was he?

 

Schuldig closed his eyes and leaned his head against the window of the car door as they raced along the Chuo-dori toward Ginza, and toward the harbor beyond Ginza. He barely felt the vibrations of the car around him; Crawford was driving like a man possessed with the demon just steps behind him.

 

Schuldig could not even be angry anymore. He did not feel betrayed, either.

 

He was fuming.

 

And yet, strangely calm. All things that had happened up to this night had been in order, following a carefully laid-out plan. Farfarello’s plan. If that plan meant to exclude them or protect them now, Schuldig did not know. He believed the Irishman’s words about having had to change a lot about what had been in the making for what had to be months now; he could not believe Farfarello would try and leave them out of everything. Not now, not after they had been part of things for days now.

 

Not after what had happened between Schuldig and the Irishman.

 

But he could not really be surprised. Farfarello had been Schwarz, he had learned cunning and treachery from the best. Schwarz, for all intentional purposes, was no more, and why should the Irishman shy from using what he had learned on his erstwhile companions? Everyone did what they knew best, and ‘good’ was just a subjective point of view. And yet it seemed Farfarello had learned from them a little too well. To think that everything, even after all those other betrayals and lies, had merely been distraction…they should be proud. Schuldig should be proud. He was, after all, the master of all mind games, was he not?

 

He was not surprised to receive a barrage of similar thoughts from Crawford and Nagi as he touched their minds with his. They had learned _that_ lesson by now, no need to drive the point home. Farfarello simply was not noble enough to have planned things this way to keep them out of it in order to protect them. No, this was Farfarello’s show, and he planned to take the spotlight as long as it lasted.

 

No surprise there, either.

 

So let him have that spotlight. Schuldig’s jaw tightened. But let him be alive when they got to the harbor, too.

 

\---

 

There was no chance they could have made it to the harbor before Farfarello. Uenokõen was twice as far away from the waterfront as Ginza. Crawford started driving over red lights and taking corners with reckless abandon, but that was just as well.

 

They still did not make it in time.

 

Arriving at the corner of Hama Rikyu Garden, squeezed in between the Tsukiji Fish Market on the right and Takeshiba Pier on the left, they had barely gotten out of the car as the blinding light of an explosion erupted into the dark sky. Instinctively, Schuldig turned away from the ball of smoke and burning oil that rose above the storage halls near the waterfront, shielding his face with his arms. Even here he could feel the sudden rise of heat in the air, smell the overpowering stench of burned oil and metal.

 

“Look out!” That was Nagi, shouting.

 

Schuldig squeezed his eyes shut at the approaching rain of debris and burning oil that had made it this far, nearly half a mile away from the site of the explosion. Nagi’s telekinetic shield saved them from having to dive back into the moderate safety of the car; both Schuldig and Crawford moved closer to the telekinetic and waited until what was in the sky had come down.

 

“At the edge of the garden is a small bridge, we can cross over to the pier from there on,” Crawford shouted over the din. Around them, outside Nagi’s shield, debris was burning. “Nagi, uphold the barrier!”

 

Schuldig nodded. And then the American was picking Nagi up and carried him like a child, the telepath two paces behind them. The darkness beneath the trees of Hama Rikyu Garden was sporadically lit; despite the cold season, the burning oil had set some of the garden’s lovingly cared for bushes and Sakura trees afire. The flames died out under the invisible press of Nagi’s shield as Crawford picked a way straight through the garden, trees bent under the strength of Nagi’s Gift, making space for them to move faster. Although the shield also kept most of the noise at bay, Schuldig could hear the roaring of the flames as they came to the edge of the garden. Something big had been shot into the sky and straight to hell.

 

Crawford put Nagi down as the small bridge between the garden and the pier came into view. Schuldig could hear him breathe heavily; running and fighting had not been on the week’s calendar for any of them for years now. He was a little out of breath as well.

 

“Oh my god.” Crawford said.

 

Across the short span of water between them and the pier, they could see the burning hulk of a cruise ship. A good part of the pier walk had suffered from the explosion as well: there were pieces of concrete, some of them burning, lying in chaotic array all over the pier. Schuldig took a close look at the majestic cruiser, or what was left of it, and saw that the ship’s nose had barrowed straight into the edge of the pier and taken a large chunk out of it. On the side of the ship, a frayed hole marked the place where the explosion had ripped through it. Despite the flames enveloping much of its hull, Schuldig could see that it had come from within. As they watched, another, smaller explosion rocked the ship and reverberated through the pier and the garden. Fire burst out from bull’s eye windows, licking at the white metal of its hull. The ship, motors apparently still running, began to lean sideways slowly, its bottom lifting from the water and scraping along the edge of the already destroyed pier, taking more concrete with it on its journey below.

 

“We have to get closer,” Crawford announced. “Nagi.”

 

The Japanese nodded and let himself be lifted again. Using his Gift for a prolonged time severely inhibited Nagi’s physical strength. Under the current circumstances, Crawford apparently was not willing to take any risks.

 

They moved across the bridge single-file and took the route well out of reach of the licking flames. Despite the telekinetic shield, the heat was nearly unbearable. Schuldig felt it like a blanket against his skin as they came upon the first corpses. Most of them had faces burned beyond recognition. Shattered bones from the shockwave of the first explosion, and they had been taken by surprise, and what a horrid surprise it had been. The ship must have taken a normal route well into the harbor and close to the pier before it exploded.

 

“They - ” Crawford cut himself off, back tensing. Schuldig stopped and frowned, then understood. He followed the American’s outstretched arm and looked to the now orange sky, orange sky marred by black clouds. “There.”

 

A helicopter broke through the clouds, swirling them around its rotor blades and dragging them after like a wedding gown. It hovered above the pier for a few moments, as if looking at the damage below like an insect hovering above a carcass, and then pulled away and toward the city. A second helicopter followed a breath later.

 

“Eszet,” Nagi said in a soft voice before he let his head sink down on Crawford’s shoulder. “Looks like we’re not the only ones who were in for a surprise.”

 

Schuldig stared at a corpse lying at the edge of the telekinetic shield and could not help the sinking feeling in his stomach. Those were Farfarello’s people, lying here like rag dolls carelessly tossed aside. He closed his eyes and extended his Gift around them, trying for signs of life, and found them encased within the burning grave of a ship slowly beginning to sink.

 

“There’s people trapped in there,” he said, more to himself than to Crawford or Nagi. He closed his mind off to the helpless screams of pain and dying he could hear.

 

“What now?” Nagi asked.

 

“We’re getting the hell out of here now,” Crawford said in a low growl. “Schuldig, can you…?” He cut himself off again, then shook his head. “Never mind. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

 

Schuldig did not look at the American, stood still where he had been standing, and looked at the burning ship and the corpses, at the debris, the concrete. He could hear the unfinished question Crawford had wanted to ask hanging in the air between them.

 

_Can you sense if Far is still alive?_

 

No, he thought. I can’t.

 

\---

 

He experienced the ‘let’s get the hell out of here’ part as a wild rush of images and sounds past a mind that seemed to have been caught in a time freeze. Everything seemed very close and very distant at the same time. The only distinct impression lastingly imprinted on his mind was the knowledge that if Farfarello had been among the corpses at the pier, they would never know. It was not like the Irishman to stay behind the lines. He would have been at the front, one of the first to be hit by the explosion, and Schuldig knew what fire and shockwaves did to a body.

 

Offering no resistance, he let himself be shoved into the backseat of the BMW and held on as Crawford performed a tire-screeching turn that would bring them as far away from the harbor as possible. They had barely crossed the rails of the Expressway No 1 Uenosen line running parallel to the harbor as the first wailing sirens greeted them. Every single squad car and firefighter truck of Tokyo seemed to be heading toward the harbor. Crawford pulled the BMW to the curb and switched the lights off, waiting for the barrage of cars to pass them. As soon as they – and the inevitable bulk of newscaster vans – had, Crawford pulled into the road again, driving exactly the speed limit this time.

 

Schuldig knew enough about mental trauma to admit to himself that he was in shock. Knew he had to take this carefully and slowly before he locked himself away in a corner of his mind where nothing and no one would reach him. Over and over again, he reminded himself of reality: that Farfarello was almost certainly dead unless a miracle had saved the Irishman, that Farfarello’s plan had backfired – and that was a little too ironic, now wasn’t it? Backfired? – and that Eszet had patted them all on the head and streaked past them with flying banners.

 

And that was really Farfarello’s fault. He could have told them. He could have included them, and Schuldig was certain that for a while, he had. He did not want to even think about the possibility that everything between him and the Irishman had been a game, a plan, something to distract Schuldig from what Farfarello had been planning and doing on the side.

 

“Schuldig,” Crawford said. “Do something. Smoke a cigarette, make a comment, just don’t just sit there and brood.”

 

Schuldig raised his eyes and caught Crawford’s in the rearview mirror. He had expected to find anger in Crawford’s eyes, and he could have dealt with that. But the compassion he found directed at him was almost sickening, and he turned away to look out of the window.

 

Do something. Yeah, he would have loved to do something. He would have loved to go straight back to the pier and turn over every corpse until he had found Farfarello’s. But it was too late for that now: the police were there, and with them undoubtedly Manx. They might find him, but they would not be able to identify him. Farfarello must have been standing at the very front. They would find a few teeth, maybe. Maybe a knife, deformed by the heat, molten to a clump. If they could not identify him, how could Schuldig?

 

“Oh god.”

 

Out of the corner of his eye, Schuldig saw Nagi bend down in the front seat. Saw Crawford’s eyes shift from him to Nagi, and then the BMW came to such an abrupt halt that the telepath hit the seat in front of him with a painful smack. He felt a little dumbfounded as Crawford yanked the car over to the curb again and got out, slamming the door forcefully.

 

“What’s…”

 

Wordlessly, Nagi turned around in his seat and held the tracing monitor up for Schuldig. The red light was moving across the screen in a slow but precise route.

 

Outside, next to the car, Crawford stood with his hands on his hips, chin straight out as though he was sniffing the air. The telepath opened the car door just in time to hear Crawford’s angry scream.

 

“Farfarello? WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?”

 

\---

 

“He’s close.” Nagi said softly, his head bent so far over the tiny monitor that his nose nearly touched it.

 

Close. Close was good. ‘There’ would have been even better. Schuldig looked around and suppressed the confusion trying to take over his thoughts. He could be confused later, after they had found one black-clad killer within these dark streets. He could be angry later, when he was sure it was Farfarello causing the tracing monitor to lead them through the maze of Shinbashi’s streets. They had left the car behind them as soon as they hit the first meandering backstreets of the district, knowing Farfarello would know it was them. Knowing Farfarello did not want them to find him, otherwise he would never have pulled this entire stunt in the first place.

 

“Spread out,” Crawford said in a low voice. “We have to find him.”

 

And please, let it be me who finds him, Schuldig added. From the expression on Crawford’s face, it was easy to deduce that the American would try to beat the living hell out of the Irishman as soon as he got a hold of him. Schuldig felt much the same way by now, but he felt he had more reasons to do it.

 

He looked over Nagi’s shoulder before he stepped away from Crawford and him. In front of them, the street forked out into three others, and in one of them, and steadily moving away from Crawford, Nagi and Schuldig, was Farfarello. One was as good as the rest, Schuldig knew, and chose the street to the right, not stopping to look back which one Nagi and Crawford would chose.

 

Yeah, he would beat the living hell out of Farfarello. After he had made sure the Irishman was okay, that there were no broken bones, no missing limbs, and a mouth he could kiss.

 

He stayed as close to the shadows as possible and moved as fast as trying to stay unnoticed would allow him. The street made a bend after a few hundred feet, forking yet again. Schuldig stopped and listened. No footsteps, only the distant wailing of the sirens and a steady dripping of water somewhere. He moved on, stopping ever so often, trying to make out shapes in the shadows ahead. As he was about to cross from beneath an awning to the entrance of a doorway, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and spun around.

 

On the other side of the street, in a narrow pass between two houses barely large enough to allow him to fit into it, Farfarello stood and calmly stared at him before he moved backward and disappeared out of view.

 

“Wait!”

 

It _was_ a tight fit. Schuldig scraped one shoulder as he squeezed himself between the walls, eyes on the shadow in front of him. What little light squeezed into the narrow passageway allowed him to catch glimpses of the Irishman’s white hair in front of him as Farfarello moved away from him. Schuldig’s foot snagged on something; he scraped his palm open as he caught his fall and scrambled on, his other hand reached out in front of him. 

 

“Far!” 

 

He was about halfway through the passage as he saw Farfarello step onto the sidewalk in front of him, breathing heavily. There the Irishman hesitated, lips parted, staring back at Schuldig as though he could not quite decide whether or not to run away.

 

As it was, Crawford took that choice from him. The American appeared behind Farfarello like a shadow and cracked the butt of his gun down on the back of Farfarello’s head, catching him as he fell. Schuldig emerged from the passageway just in time to catch the tail end of a muttered curse falling from Crawford’s lips.

 

“…gonna fucking _chain_ you to something.”

 

**January 25** **th** **, 2002, Tokyo**

**1220 Hours**

 

Midday sun, bright and piercing, barely made it past the drawn curtains of the room. Schuldig shifted on his side and assumed a more comfortable position on the narrow bed, his head pillowed on one arm, his other arm draped securely over the still form lying pressed against him.

 

He knew Farfarello was awake, but there was no reason to speak, not yet. For the moment, the telepath was content to cradle the other man, lips tickled by the soft hairs at the nape of Farfarello’s neck, Farfarello’s back a source of heat against his stomach and chest. He had known the moment the Irishman woke up, felt the slight acceleration of his heartbeat and heard the single short breath. Now Farfarello was just lying there, silently. Schuldig gently tightened his fingers where they were interlaced with Farfarello’s and smiled at the clinking of the chains. When Crawford threatened to chain Farfarello to something, Schuldig had not yet known how serious a threat it had been.

 

The idea to chain Farfarello to Schuldig with handcuffs was ingenious, he had to admit. And as Crawford had put it, ‘apparently the only way to keep _some_ kind of track of him’.

 

Aside from minor cuts and bruises, Farfarello’s body bore no other signs that he had even been close to the explosion at the harbor, and that, Schuldig knew, was something he desperately wanted to ask him about. Farfarello’s clothing had not been singed, and he had not smelled of oil or smoke as they dragged him back to the car. The tracing chip had sat securely in the knife sheath along with a knife that had not been in use during the night.

 

“Where are we?” Farfarello sounded tired, resigned. He did not move within the curve of Schuldig’s body.

 

Schuldig nuzzled into the soft hair under his lips and scraped his teeth along the skin of Farfarello’s neck. Felt the shiver through the body pressed against his and bit down hard until he tasted blood, and then the anger was tangible, a bitter taste on the back of his tongue. He pushed himself up and rolled Farfarello onto his back and hit him across the face with his free hand.

 

“Somewhere you won’t run away from me, you bastard!”

 

It came out harshly, but Schuldig felt he had the right to be angry. By all gods, if anyone had the right to be angry, it was him. He pulled his arm back and hit Farfarello again, feeling dark satisfaction at the blood rolling from a split lip. Felt even more satisfaction as he leaned down and bit into Farfarello’s lip, sucking the blood from the small wound. His left hand wound around the base of Farfarello’s throat, dragging Farfarello’s left hand with it. He let go of Farfarello’s lip and leaned up, shifting his weight onto his left arm, onto Farfarello’s throat, and pressed for one wonderful moment, feeling the muscles under his palm contract sharply as his thumb pressed into the soft hollow at the base of Farfarello’s throat.

 

He let go only as Farfarello gagged and began to reach up to wrap his hand around Schuldig’s wrist.

 

“If you’re going to kill me, do it right,” Farfarello said flatly, breathing a little deeper than he had before. His face seemed even paler than usual, but the glow in his eye made up for that.

 

Schuldig hit him yet again, hard enough to feel the small bones in his hand tingle with pain.

 

“I should. That was really the last straw, Far.” He lifted his left hand and Farfarello’s along with it, shaking it so the chains of the handcuffs rattled. “And until I do, these will stay where they are.”

 

If shrugs could be conveyed through a glance, Farfarello now offered him a perfect example of one. Schuldig felt the anger he had just managed to beat into a corner rise again and took a deep breath to calm himself down. He watched the Irishman as he turned his head to the side as if offering his face to Schuldig for another slap, but then realized Farfarello was looking at the room around them. Something in his stomach tightened at the attitude shoved in his face, something that demanded he do something terrible to him. Kill him. Rape him. Beat him until bones were breaking and maybe then Farfarello would finally show some reaction other than placid carelessness.

 

He knew he would not get another reaction, not this way, and cast the ideas aside.

 

“I love you.”

 

He saw a muscle in Farfarello’s jaw jump at the words and repeated them. Cupped Farfarello’s face with his free hand and forced his head around so he could look at him when he said them again.

 

“Don’t say what you don’t mean,” Farfarello pressed out between thin lips.

 

Schuldig snorted and tightened his fingers when the Irishman attempted to turn his head. “You’re one to talk, Far. Really, you’re a scream. Isn’t that what you were aiming for? ‘I think you’re beautiful’, ‘I would give you all the silence in the world’, all that crap? Well, you got a problem now, pal.”

 

He lowered his head and rubbed his lips across Farfarello’s, daring him to bite, which it looked Farfarello would do the way his eye narrowed and his lips pressed together at the contact. That was fine. He extended his arm above Farfarello’s head and grabbed the headboard of the bed, forcing the Irishman’s arm up with his. Lowering himself onto Farfarello’s prone body, Schuldig cupped Farfarello’s face yet again, mouth so close to his they were breathing each other’s breath.

 

“The problem is, I want you now. And not just here and now, but for as long as I can keep you. You don’t go around offering someone like me something only to pull it away as soon as you can’t fit it into your plans anymore.” Schuldig placed a kiss on the corner of Farfarello’s mouth and licked at the congealing blood. “You play your games, I play mine. And you’ve just lost yours.”

 

And of course Farfarello would answer back to this, but the telepath did not let him. He shoved his tongue into Farfarello’s mouth as soon as it opened and kissed him for all he was worth, ignoring the Irishman’s sound of protest, ignoring the hand that snaked around his back and wound into his hair with painful strength. Only when the pull on his hair became too strong to ignore any longer without suffering torn scalp did Schuldig pull back, a little out of breath, happy to see that Farfarello was even more out of breath. He maintained the closeness between them, resting his forehead against Farfarello’s.

 

“I cut it into your back, didn’t I? Mine. Those scars are still there. I will rip you open and cut it into your heart next time you run away from me, and I know you will let me.”

 

He was a little surprised by the heat behind the statement, but he did not regret it. Slipping his hand from Farfarello’s face to his chest, he pressed his palm against a steadily beating heart hard enough to make ribs give way under his hand. Kept his eyes open although it was hard to focus on Farfarello’s face from this close, and he did not say more, because all had been said, and Schuldig was tired of reasoning with him.

 

He found, now that he had said it out loud, that there was a curious freedom behind those three little words. Much like openly announcing something he wanted and was intending to possess no matter what, throwing them in Farfarello’s face made accepting all the baggage that came with the words lighter. Schuldig had always been loud and obnoxious about his wants and needs, but this time he knew he would kill to get and keep what he wanted. Maybe even kill Farfarello, if it came down to it and the Irishman kept throwing stones at him Schuldig felt he did not deserve being hit with. Farfarello had put him on the emotional roller coaster over the last few days, and things were happening too fast for Schuldig. It was time to slow down, take a step back, and reevaluate things between them. If Farfarello was unwilling or unable to _keep_ , then Schuldig would take care of that.

 

They lay in silence for long minutes. Gradually, the hand at the back of Schuldig’s head began to relax until it was simply resting on the nape of his neck, the fingers stationary. The telepath turned his head and rubbed his lips across Farfarello’s cheek before he slid them onto his mouth, initiating a long, sated, slow kiss that seemed to last for an eternity. Farfarello relaxed completely beneath him. Schuldig knew that sooner or later, he would have to ask him about what had happened at the harbor, but it would be later rather than sooner. Not now. Schuldig found he was not all that interested. Crawford, Nagi and he were alive, Farfarello was alive. Sometimes it were the little things that meant the most.

 

\---

 

A cup of coffee and a stale piece of toast. He glared at the concoction on his plate and shoved it away.

 

Schuldig sighed. “Aren’t you hungry?”

 

“How can you think about eating at a time like this?” Farfarello seemed on the verge of a mental breakdown. “I have to get away from here and back to Tokyo, I have to take care of those damn Eszet bastards and then- ”

 

“We have to eat, and think, and plan.” Crawford’s voice held steel and ice. “And what’s all that ‘I’ business I hear?”

 

Schuldig could not see the stare the Irishman at his side directed at Crawford across the table, but it must have been murderous. The American held it easily. He sighed again and took a sip of coffee, trying to ignore the staring contest between Farfarello and Crawford. Nagi, in a chair near the window, just shook his head. The young Japanese had been silently watching Schuldig and Farfarello since they emerged from the confines of the bedroom.

 

Outside, it was silent. That, Schuldig thought, was the most unsettling thing. It was too damn quiet. The small house on the outskirts of Tokyo, sitting safely in an embrace of pine trees and bushes, was just one of many ‘away from the hectic city’ lodgings preferred by rich Tokyo inhabitants. The next traffic-ridden street a good two miles away, all one could hear around here was the annoyingly chipper song of birds and the wind rustling through the trees. Every once in a while, there would be the sound of a car engine close by, but those cars always went past them, headed toward the houses sitting in small green squares of trees, bushes and grass even further away from Tokyo. Spending days in the hectic beehive buzz that was Tokyo did not prepare for this bottomless silence.

 

There were only a few shops around, run by locals. Schuldig had not paid too much attention to the world outside the car as they sped through the remainder the night toward elusive safety; he had not offered resistance at Crawford’s announcement that for now, they were going to leave the city until they straightened things out. Nagi had ventured to do grocery shopping. A _gaijin_ here would raise too much curiosity. Schuldig had just accepted the handcuffs from Crawford, dragged Farfarello into the next available room of the house they had chosen, closed the door, and to hell with what was outside. It could wait.

 

“Crawford, we must get back there and eliminate them _now_.”

 

Apparently, it could not. He focused on the discussion between Farfarello and Crawford and looked up briefly as Nagi dragged his chair to the table to join them.

 

“We can’t let them have the chance of settling down. Once they get a grip on their surroundings it’ll just be hell to try and get them to let go again.”

 

“Can’t say that really bugs me, Far.” Crawford crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back. “I’d be more interested in learning what the hell went down at the harbor tonight. Care to clue us in?”

 

“I’d like to know, too,” Nagi said quietly. “And if I so much as even think you’re lying again, I’ll just leave.”

 

Schuldig raised an eyebrow but said nothing. On the way out of Tokyo, Nagi had quietly stated things were becoming too much for him. He could not blame him.

 

“I didn’t ask you to come here in the first place.”

 

Nagi opened his mouth and shut it again, out of words. Ouch. That had been pure acid meant to hurt. Schuldig gripped Farfarello’s hand beneath the table and squeezed it once in warning. “Easy there, Far.”

 

“No!” The Irishman turned to him, eye wild, expression a mask of anger. “What the hell is everyone expecting from me? I didn’t ask you to join me, I didn’t ask you to back me up, hell, I would’ve been happy if I’d never seen any of you again! You just barged in here, upset all my plans, plans that had been in the making for months, and expect me to go along with this?”

 

“You’re becoming repetitive,” Crawford said calmly. “You’ve said all this before, Far. Did it ever cross your mind that we don’t give a damn?”

 

Farfarello yanked his left hand up and Schuldig’s along with it. “No kidding.”

 

Schuldig pulled the hand back down, keeping his fingers locked around Farfarello’s wrist. “First things first. What happened at the harbor? What went wrong?”

 

“What do you mean? It all went according to plan!” The Irishman threw him a glance that danced between anger and…something else. “Until you showed up.”

 

\---

 

He found Crawford in the small garden behind the house, sitting on a bench beneath a naked Sakura tree. Schuldig stopped on the threshold of the backdoor and smelled the air, hands in his pockets. It was cold outside, but not unpleasant – the crisp, fresh smell of air relatively free of exhaust fumes and human sweat. He enjoyed it for a minute before he stepped outside, his breath trailing white clouds behind him as he picked his way toward the American and sat down on the other end of the bench.

 

“Cuffed him to the heater in the bedroom,” he explained at Crawford’s inquiring glance at his handcuff-free wrist. “If he manages to rip that one out of the wall, I’ll lose all my faith in metal.”

 

“What if he cuts his hand off?” Crawford did not seem to be inclined to joke. “Schuldig, did it ever occur to you that it might be a good idea to just put a bullet in his head and get out of here?”

 

“You’d have to put a bullet in my head, too.”

 

Crawford sighed and nodded. “I know. Made up your mind about that, finally?”

 

“You could say that.”

 

“I could say a lot, Schu. I’m just not sure it’d do any good.”

 

“Crawford losing his faith? That’s a new one.” Schuldig pushed his hands deeper into his pockets. He put it down to imagination that it seemed colder here in the country than it had been in the heart of the city.

 

“There isn’t much else left to lose, you know?”

 

The tone of voice surprised and annoyed him at the same time. “Please don’t give me a speech now, Crawford. I’ve had just about enough of those.”

 

“I’m just asking myself how we – I could have been so blind for years.” Crawford turned and put one foot up on the bench, slinging an arm around it and resting his chin on top of that. “He doesn’t really have any conscience, does he?”

 

Schuldig would never say it out loud, but sometimes, there were holes in Brad Crawford’s iron composure. They were easy to ignore and still easier to miss, but a trained telepath knew where to look for them. Schuldig had spent years looking, and he had found them. Had recognized them again, after five years. The death of his wife and daughter had ripped a few new ones that would never quite heal. Although Schuldig had not spent a lot of time thinking about or paying attention to Crawford in the last days, he could see the rigid composure the American was upholding slowly beginning to fall apart. It had been crumbling for some time, maybe even since their failed attempt at destroying Eszet years ago, but Crawford was a master of masks. And now, these masks were slipping. And Schuldig did not have the slightest clue what to do about it. Damage control was not his strongest point.

 

“I thought I was so sure about what I was going to do here,” Crawford went on when Schuldig did not answer. “Now it seems that all I’m doing is running after Farfarello.”

 

“Crawford, what are you trying to tell me? That you’re unsure about your standing? Do you think I have an idea where I am standing?”

 

“At least he trusts you.”

 

“As far as I recall, the ‘get all my people killed at the harbor and then run off’ plan did not include me.” Schuldig rubbed his hands over his face. “Look, I’ve asked him why he did that. And he didn’t answer. I don’t know what this is all about. Far is planning something, but he doesn’t tell me. And what he did tell me, us, well, most of that turned out to be distractions to keep us unaware of what is really going on.”

 

Crawford nodded. “I’m just…shocked, I guess. When he told us that he had simply let his people die at the harbor, that it was a part of his plan…I guess for the first time since I’ve known him I’ve seen how far out of reach he really is. To all of us.”

 

That had a sound to it Schuldig did not like. “What do you mean?”

 

“Don’t you see it? He’s not human. If I could go on pretending he’s insane, it wouldn’t make it easier, but it would at least make sense. But he’s not. He let his own people be killed, planned to have it happen this way.” Crawford shook his head. “I’m just trying to figure out what would happen if he decides _we_ are good cannon fodder, too.”

 

“I don’t think he’d do that to me.”

 

“I wasn’t talking about you,” Crawford said coldly. “Nagi is worried, Schu. I am worried. I’m not so sure anymore that if it comes down to it, Farfarello would hesitate to kill us, too.”

 

Schuldig remembered the conversation he had had with the Irishman in the bar in Roppongi. Farfarello had expressed dislike for Crawford in the most friendly way in front of Schuldig, but he had threatened to kill him when Schuldig and Crawford had come to the Seventh Serpent the first time.

 

“So what are you saying? That we should just shoot him and get out of here? What happened to destroying Eszet?”

 

“I’m just saying we should be very, very careful around him now.”

 

“Crawford, that goes without saying. We’re dealing with Farfarello.” Schuldig was becoming increasingly irritated with the entire conversation. Now was definitely not the time for soul searching talks. “And just for the record, if you try to kill him, you’ll have to go through _me_ first.”

 

Crawford stiffened, and Schuldig felt the anger and – what was that? Ah yes, disgust – disgust directed at him rise like an invisible wall between them. He sighed.

 

“Look, I’ve made my choice. You came here to avenge the death of your wife and kid, and I’m now here saying that I’ll protect the man I love.”

 

Crawford looked away. “Even if he’s a monster?”

 

“Monsters are for fairytales, Crawford.” Schuldig rose and brushed his hands over his jacket. “And this is anything but.”

 

By the time Schuldig had reached the backdoor, he knew what he was going to do.

 

\---

 

Nagi did not turn around as Schuldig walked back into the kitchen of the house. He had been quiet for hours now, simply sitting and watching, as if he was evaluating to make up his mind later. Schuldig gazed at his back, consciously trying not to read the young man’s thoughts. He had just had a barrage of that sent his way via Crawford’s mouth, and an additional mental portion was not what he fancied now. He was at the door to the bedroom when Nagi softly called out to him.

 

“Schu.”

 

Hand on the door knob, the telepath looked back over his shoulder. “What?”

 

“He was rummaging around in there while you were outside.” Nagi’s head sank a fraction. “Just wanted you to know.”

 

There was silence behind the door. Schuldig hesitated, then walked over to Nagi and sat down on the edge of the table. It took long seconds of heavy silence until Nagi finally raised his head and met his gaze, and the look in the young man’s dark blue eyes was unfathomable.

 

“Go on,” Schuldig coaxed. “If there’s anything to say, say it now. Before I go in there, un-cuff him, and leave.”

 

Surprised, Nagi focused on his face. “You’re leaving?”

 

“Seems the only sensible thing to do.” The more he thought about it, the more sense it made, really. Although Schuldig could not claim being happy with Farfarello’s ‘distractions’, getting him away from Crawford might help the situation. He added, “Before we start hacking at each other, I mean.”

 

Nagi considered this, head cocked to the side. In moments like this, Schuldig thought, the quiet, reserved boy from five years ago shone through the young adult Nagi had become. Strangely, he felt that between Nagi and Crawford, the young Japanese was the one would handled the entire situation better, and that, too, was a heritage of their past. Nagi had always been the one to stay in the background and consider a problem from all sides before he acted. The only time Schuldig had ever seen him act irrationally had been when that girl died, and who could blame him for that? Schuldig was about to literally let lose a walking source of problems and accompany it to a place where they most likely were going to die a horrible death. He would not cast the first stone.

 

“I’m worried,” Nagi finally said. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want you to leave. But Crawford thinks Farfarello might just turn on us all if he feels like it.”

 

“Did you have the same thoughts five years ago, when we were all convinced he was insane and would kill anything that moves?” Schuldig could not keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

 

“No. But there’s a difference between having an insane person attack you and having someone attack you who knows just what he is doing.” Nagi shrugged lightly. “I don’t like the idea of him smiling at me when he’s ramming a knife into my back two minutes later because he thinks it is convenient for a plan.”

 

Touché. Schuldig glanced at the bedroom door. He really wanted to go in there and be with Farfarello now. Wanted to talk to him, figure things out, and then curl around him and sleep for a century. Screw him silly while he was at it. Somehow establish once and for all that where Farfarello was, Schuldig wanted to be, and vice versa.

 

He caught Nagi’s accusing glance out of the corner of his eye and raised an eyebrow at him.

 

“You’re not thinking about me or Crawford at all, aren’t you? You’re thinking about him, and you, and how you’ll make the best of the situation.”

 

Sometimes, Nagi was frighteningly perceptive. Schuldig considered Nagi’s words, trying to come up with an answer that would not sound snappy and arrogant.

 

In the end, he said, “You know me too well.” It was not quite what he had meant to say, but it was said. He rose and turned to walk toward the door once more, tasting something bitter on the back of his tongue. Defeat? Hardly. Schuldig was too proud to admit to himself that he might have lost this or any battle. Temporary setbacks, maybe, on his slow but steady way to anywhere-but-here, but never defeat.

 

Nagi’s voice reached him once more. “It’s just going to be like this? You’ll just walk in there and then you’ll leave with him?”

 

“What else is there?”

 

“I don’t know. Grand words of good bye, happy speeches, talks about how we’re all better off that way?” Anger mixed with Nagi’s voice, anger so tangible Schuldig did not have to turn around to see or read Nagi’s mind to hear it. It faded with his next words. “For one perfect moment I thought things were going to be…you know what I mean.”

 

He had his hand on the door knob again, but he did not turn around. “No. I don’t know.” Knew, but there was no reason why he should make this any harder than it already was. “You tell me.”

 

“I thought it was going to be like old times, Schu.”

 

He heard Nagi get to his feet, footsteps. Behind that door was Farfarello, chained to the heater. Breathed in, breathed out, and Nagi was at his side.

 

“I thought we could be Schwarz again.”

 

“Schwarz is in the past, Nagi.” Schuldig sighed. “And the only one around here who seems to understand it is Farfarello. We’re not…”

 

“Family anymore?”

 

He had to chuckle. “We never were.”

 

He turned the door knob and closed the door in Nagi’s face. Farfarello was sitting beneath the window, chin down to his chest, asleep. Schuldig tried to lose himself in the scene, tried to tell himself he was doing the right thing and not just…running away from everything again. When had things become so complicated? His life had taken on soap opera qualities ever since Crawford had traced him down in Venice. When had he ever thought about what he was doing to others? Schuldig leaned against the door and watched the Irishman, not even trying to figure out if Farfarello was truly asleep or faking it. He was quiet, and it gave Schuldig a few precious moments to contemplate.

 

But the thoughts would not come. He heard footsteps outside the room, Crawford and Nagi quietly talking, the sound of a car passing in the distance outside the window. It was dangerously close to the feeling he had experienced when Farfarello silenced his mind.

 

Blinking, Schuldig shook his head once, then locked his eyes on Farfarello’s wrist where it was divided by the metal band of the handcuff. The skin there was slightly red, looking as though the Irishman had tried to yank himself free from the heater but not succeeded. He let his eyes travel along sinewy muscle just barely visible under milky skin, traced the jutting collarbone, the graceful curve of Farfarello’s neck. Schuldig realized he could lose himself in watching his lover.

 

“Far,” he said softly, “wake up. We have to leave now.”

 

Farfarello raised his head as though Schuldig’s voice had switched him on. “About damn time.”

 

Schuldig’s smile froze on his lips. He did not know he was walking backward until he hit the door behind him. Reality shifted and the walls of the house itself seemed to shake as Farfarello rose to his feet in a fluid move, effortlessly snapping the chain link between the handcuffs.

 

“What - ”

 

“Lazarus…rising.” As if that would explain it all. Then, “Sorry.”

 

Schuldig would later remember that he held his hands up defensively as Farfarello raised both of his, palms out toward the telepath, a manic grin barely visible through his fingers. Farfarello’s skin seemed to glow, but that, too, would be remembered later.

 

He turned toward the door, mouth opening to scream in defiance. By the third time he had banged his head against the solid wood, his consciousness was slipping. By the fifth time, the world went white.

 

 

 

 

 

\---

 

[1] Pachinko – a pinball-like game very popular in Japan. The term ‘pachinko’ is derived from the Japanese term ‘pachi-pachi’, roughly meaning the clicking of small objects or the crackling of fire. For more information: [http://www.pachinko.com/english/  
](http://www.pachinko.com/english/)

[2] _gaijin_ (Jap.) – ‘stranger, foreigner’

 

[3] “The Shining”, made in 1980 by Stanley Kubrick, is somewhat of a cult movie of the horror/suspense genre. Based loosely on a book by Stephen King, the story revolves around a family consisting of mother, father and son, who move into a remotely located hotel over the winter to take care of the building. Needless to say, and without wanting to spoil the plot, Very Bad Things Happen Very Soon.   


 

[4] “Póg mo thón!” (IG) – lit: “Kiss my ass!”

 

[5] Sylvia Lin is a character from the Weiß Kreuz Dramatic Albums. I’ve just used the name; in this story, the happenings of Schwarz I and II are out of fannon. 

 

[6] “nach mir die Sintflut” (Ger) – literally, ‘after me the flood can come’, an expression used to announce that one will think of oneself first and the rest of the world may kiss one’s ass. 

 

[7] Information on the Tokyo Dome as well as an events schedule can be found at: [http://www.tokyo-dome.co.jp/e/](http://www.tokyo-dome.co.jp/e/) The dates I used are actual dates. 

 

Sources: Doge of Venice: Venice culture, events, tourism, etc: [http://www.doge.it/](http://www.doge.it/)

Japan: A Dorling Kindersley (DK) Travel Guide: [http://www.dk.com/](http://www.dk.com/)

Viva Twin! TOKYO Travel Guides, RV Verlag

And an ordinary street map of Tokyo

 

I have never been to Japan. All the information, street names, place names, etc, has been taken from various travel guides and online sources. If someone finds something missing or an error, don’t hesitate to email me. 

 

The information on the Lazarus Stone, as I have called the stone artifact used by the Elders of Eszet, is pure fantasy. If there is such a stone out there, then it is not the one I’m talking about. Information on Lazarus of Bethany can be found in the Bible. 

 

The ‘Seventh Serpent’, the bar owned by Farfarello in a small street of Ginza in the heart of Tokyo, does not really exist. I had used the name in a story I wrote when I was 15. It’s pure cliché. If there is a real bar with that name out there, no copyright infringement intended. 

 

I made up all persons in this story, except for the characters of Weiß Kreuz and Schwarz. Likenesses between real persons, dead or alive, were purely unintentional, and should not be taken as offense. Moreover, in retrospect…I couldn’t have picked a worse name than ‘Garfield’…


End file.
